Page 18 - Logical and Spiritual Reflections

14 LOGICAL REFLECTIONS

If appearance were not, ab initio at least, admitted as reality rather than as illusion or as
problematic, we would be denying it or putting it in doubt without cause – and yet we
would be granting this causeless denial or doubt the status of a primary truth that does not
need to be justified. This would be an arbitrary and self-contradictory posture – an
imposture posing as logical insight. All discourse must begin with some granted truth – and
in that case, the most credible and consistent truth is the assumption of appearance as
reality unless or until otherwise proved.

We may well later, ad terminatio (in the last analysis), conclude that our assumption that
this appearance was real was erroneous, and reclassify it as illusory. This happens
occasionally, when we come across conflicts between appearances (or our interpretations
of them). In such cases, we have to review in detail the basis for each of the conflicting
theses and then decide which of them is the most credible (in accord with numerous
principles of adduction).

It should be stressed that this stage of reconciliation between conflicting appearances is not
a consequence of adopting reality as the default value of appearances. It would occur even
if we insisted on neutral appearances and refused all working hypotheses. Conflicts would
still appear and we would still have to solve the problem they pose. In any case, never
forget, the assumption of reality rather than illusion only occurs when and for so long as no
contradiction results. Otherwise, contradictions would arise very frequently.

Note well that I do not understand appearance in quite the same way Edmund
Husserl does, as something ab initio and intrinsically mental; such a view is closer
to Hume or even Berkeley than to me.

The ground floor of Husserl’s phenomenology and mine differ in the primacy
accorded to the concepts of consciousness and of the subject of consciousness. My
own approach tries to be maximally neutral, in that appearances are initially taken
as just ‘what appears’, without immediately judging them as ‘contents of
someone’s consciousness’. Whereas, in Husserl’s approach, the wider context of
appearance is from the start considered as part and parcel of the appearance.

For me, some content comes first, and only thereafter do we, by a deduction or by
an inductive inference, or perhaps more precisely by an intuition (an additional,
secondary, reflexive act of consciousness), become aware of the context of
consciousness and conscious subject. At this later stage, we go back and label the
appearance as a “content of” consciousness, i.e. as something whose apparition
(though not whose existence) is made possible by an act of consciousness by some
subject. Content is chronologically primary, the context is secondary.

Whereas in Husserl’s philosophy, the fact of consciousness and its subject are
present from the start, as soon as the appearance appears. Husserl’s mistake, in my
view, is to confuse logical order and chronological order, or ontological and
epistemological. Of course, logically and ontologically, appearance implies
consciousness and someone being conscious; but chronologically and
epistemologically, they occur in succession.

As a result of this difference, his approach has a more subjectivist flavor than mine,
and mine has a more objectivist flavor than his. Note, however, that in his later
work Husserl tried more and more to shift from implied subjectivism to explicit
objectivism.
We have seen the logic of induction in the special case of generalization. Given the
positive particular ‘Some X are Y’ (appearance), we may generalize to the corresponding