† It is a curious fact that intentionality, one of the favorite theses of the phenomenologist, is least congenial to the solipsistic character of transcendental phenomenology. As Collins has observed, the one thing Husserl fails to explain is the intentional character of consciousness. What is intended?
* Roy Wood Sellars used “denote” more or less interchangeably with “perceive” and “intend”: “…we should need to distinguish between the intuition of a sensory appearance, which alone is given, and the denotative selection of a thing-object which is believed in and characterized.”
† Cassirer thus stands at the opposite pole from the semanticists. So far from it being a case of a thing being known and a label later attached by a semantic rule, it is the symbolic formulation itself which is the act of knowing. The “real” object tends to vanish into Kant’s noumenon.
* Is not symbolization, the pairing of sensuous symbol with an impression, a kind of judgment and abstraction? In even its most primitive form, a pointing at and naming, it is a saying that that over there is “one of these.” It is an abstraction, however, which is a far cry from the conventional notion of concept formation by which two given representations are combined. We must, as Cassirer says, take a step further back. This will take us to Lotze’s “first universal,” the primitive abstraction by which impressions are first raised to symbolizations.
13. SYMBOL AS HERMENEUTIC IN EXISTENTIALISM
IF IT IS TRUE that both Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism contain valid insights, then in respect of the failure to make a unifying effort toward giving an account of all realities, the former is surely the worse offender. For the existentialists do take note of empirical science, if only to demote it to some such category as problem Seiendes, or passionate abstract. But the empiricists are notably indifferent toward existentialism. In the empirical mind, existential categories are apt to be dismissed as “emotional” manifestations, that is, as dramatic expressions of a particular historical circumstance, or — what is worse — as exhortatory, and deserving the same attention as any other pulpiteering. Such notions as dread, Dasein, boredom, and the dichotomies authenticity — unauthenticity, freedom-falling-prey-to, aestheticethical, will inevitably appear as reducibles—if they have any meaning at all. Whatever significance they have will be assumed to yield itself in their objective correlates.
That empiricism has not found a fruitful method of dealing with these distinctively human realities is no mere normative judgment but may be inferred from the confusion of the social sciences themselves. If there is an unresolved dualism of questioner-and-nature in the professed monism of the empiricist, its difficulties do not become apparent as long as the questions are asked of nature. The canons of induction-deduction hold good: data, induction, hypothesis, deduction, test, verification, prediction, planning. But as soon as the data come to comprise not the physical world or subhuman biology but other questioners, other existents, the empirical method finds itself in certain notorious difficulties (1) The imperialism of the social sciences. As long as there is one datum man and several disciplines, each professing a different irreducible — i.e., cultural unit, libido, social monad, genetic trait — there is bound to result a deordination of the sciences of man with each claiming total competence and each privately persuaded that the other is pursuing a chimera. (2) The transcending of the questioner by his own data. Sociological material resists fixed inductions. A familiar example is the transposition of a biological method, the human subject conceived as an organism with an inventory of “needs,” with “cultural needs” as well as caloric needs. But the delineation of a “cultural need” tends to bring about the transcendence of this need by the very fact of its delineation. (3) The practice of smuggling in existential activities in a deterministic discipline. In psychoanalysis, for example, which in Freud’s words derives all mental processes from an interplay of forces, the crucial act of therapy is the exercise by the patient of a choice, that is, the assumption of a burden of effort in overcoming resistances. (4) The uncritical taking for granted or the equally uncritical ignoring of consciousness and intersubjectivity. Behaviorism ignores both, but what account can behaviorism give of the behavior of the questioner himself? The sociologist and anthropologist practice intersubjectivity; that is, they are not content merely to observe the externals of cultural traits — they try to understand the meaning of them. But what account are they prepared to give of this intersubjectivity? If Kant called it a “scandal of philosophy” that intersubjectivity had found no solution in the thought of his day, it is no less a scandal now.
Perhaps the difficulties arise not through an innate limitation of empiricism — an experiential and heterodox empiricism which, according to Hocking, would include the method of Gabriel Marcel — but because of what Dawson calls the religious presuppositions of a naturalist social science. The doctrinal precondition of this particular kind of “theological” sociology is that (1) the sociology is of the same order of determinism as physical science, (2) man is a fixed social unit, an integer, and can be regarded as a receptacle of quantifiable needs. Having laid down such a substratum, the social scientist deprives himself of the means of taking notice of existentialia in his data, let alone of giving an account of them.
But the existentialists suffer in their own way from the same deordination of the ways of knowing as the empiricists. In the Anglo-American view, existential insights appear to be “in the air”—either manifestly reducible or insufficiently grounded by causal strata. The confusion among the existentialist only confirms these suspicions. To some (Kierkegaard) the existentialia are psychological, to others (Heidegger) ontological, that is, they are the constituent traits of Dasein. Phenomenological bracketing is taken by the empiricist to be a confession of causal rootlessness.
The need of the empirical sciences of man is of an insight, a proper empirical finding, that will introduce an order of reality, a reality of existential traits, which latter, if they cannot be reduced to supposedly prime elements or verified by measurement, can at least be validated experientially and hierarchically grounded in a genuinely empirical framework.
The need of existentialism — in the empirical view at least — is a deliverance from Kantian subjectivity, whether it be Sartrean or Jasperian. As Collins puts it, the task is to take account of Kierkegaard without surrendering to Kant. This is to be achieved, as far as the sciences of man are concerned, not by a precipitous search for a regional ontology, such as the ontologizing of the existentialia of the Dasein, but by an “open” experiential empiricism which tacitly posits the world. After all, scientific method has never had much use for the Kantian Copernican revolution. But in the empirical view, the ordination of the sciences, if it is to be accomplished at all, must be accomplished from “below,” that is, from an empirically valid substratum.
The necessary bridge from traditional empiricism to existential insights may have already been supplied — unwittingly, and from the empirical side of the gulf — by the study of that particular human activity in which empiricism intersects, so to speak, with existentialism — language. It is the discovery of the symbolic transformation as the unique and universal human response.