我的奮鬥

Conclusion

 It is time to put my last card on the table. But before that, a brief review of what we have done so far might be helpful.

 Our study began with language, the language Descartes employs to write Meditations on the First Philosophy. In addition to the extraordinary literary quality, the unique character of Descartes’ writing is accentuated by his adoption of the stance from the first person. Furthermore, the decision to adopt the first-personal approach has far-reaching consequences, and it is no arbitrary decision to make. As we have seen, Descartes chooses to write in this way out of two considerations. For him, it is the best method of instruction, of showing one’s discovery in science to others. Besides, when it comes to metaphysics, in the realm of which the primary notions are not available at hand, but must be developed deliberately, it then becomes manifest that we should first of all appeal to our own experience, to clarify what is actually given to us, revealed to us there. This latter consideration renders the first-personal approach to philosophy almost necessary and inevitable for any serious philosophical undertaking. As a result, we thereby ventured into a preview of what that approach, practiced by one of the eminent phenomenologists in the twentieth century, might look like. Following Merleau-Ponty’s line of thought, we then realized that important insight pertaining to the essence of the world and man’s relationship to it may be gained under the guidance of phenomenology, the very discipline which insists on the legitimacy of Descartes’ first person without compromise.

 However, the foundation and validity of phenomenology must be established as a requisite preliminary. And we sought to accomplish this by way of a clarification of Husserl’s distinction between immanence and transcendence. According to Husserl, the distinction is twofold in nature. On the one hand, immanence refers to the internal, constituent part of our consciousness of whatever object we may encounter in the world, while transcendence refers to what is actually outside consciousness, despite the fact that it is nonetheless intended through our mental activities. On the other hand, immanence also refers to the givenness of the intended object with absolute evidence, while transcendence can be characterized as that which is posited by our consciousness without evidence and therefore can always fall back to a suspicious state, hence undermines the ground of our knowledge. In light of this analysis, we saw immediately that the two senses of the distinction need not converge. On the contrary, one of the milestones during the process of development of Husserl’s phenomenology is the comprehension that what is regarded as transcendent in one sense of the term may well be viewed as immanent, that is, given to us in our experience with absolute evidence. Indeed, this is the true way of understanding the concept of intentionality. Hence, by excluding whatever that is transcendent in the process of philosophical investigation, by suspending the existence of the object of our consciousness, be it mental or physical, by means of an exercise of the phenomenological reduction that reduces the positivity of objectivity to the evident givenness of the object in our first-personal experience, by labeling what is left with evidence after phenomenological reduction “pure phenomena”, a new discipline aiming at studying phenomena, phenomenology, is established, and the foundation of knowledge can be finally secured.

 With the teaching of phenomenology, a refined understanding of the significance of the first-personal approach in mind, we then turned to Descartes’ Meditations to examine his first important conclusion, Cogito, ergo sum. The task is divided into two parts: first, we sought to reconcile the passages from Discourse and those from the Second Meditation in order to ascertain the nature of that conclusion, that is to say, to determine whether it is an inference in the strict sense or not; next, confronting Williams’ refutation of Descartes’ conclusion, we pleaded its validity by means of a detailed criticism against Williams from the first-personal approach, the phenomenological point of view. With regard to the first part of our examination, whereas Descartes seems to suggest in Discourse that some kind of syllogism is involved to reach the conclusion of the existence of a thinking thing, no explicit process of syllogistic inference appears in the Second Meditation. Moreover, in spite of the acknowledgement of the necessity of some knowledge prior to the conclusion in Principles, Descartes even goes so far as to deny the enquirer that knowledge as the major premise of a syllogism in the Second Replies. Nevertheless, this specious conflict can be resolved by appealing to our experience of implicit and explicit knowledge. To reach the truth of “Cogito, ergo sum”, the first-personal enquirer does not need to invoke premise such as “it is impossible for something to think without existing” explicitly and make an inference from that premise. On the contrary, it suffices for him to realize that it is impossible that he thinks without existing, and hence understand the general principle “it is impossible for something to think without existing” implicitly, so that he can reach the indubitable conclusion “Cogito, ergo sum” immediately with an intuition. In other words, as long as we realize that in our concrete experience of thinking, the general principle and the particular instance are inseparable in this case, we can grasp the nature of that conclusion. As to the second part of the examination, Williams’ objection to the validity of “Cogito, ergo sum” is focused on the coherence and comprehensibility of the single statement cogito. From his point of view, the statement is incapable of expressing any objective fact from the third-personal point of view on pain of its rigid formulation in the first person, and thus lacks any meaning. However, as we have pointed out, capacity of being reduced to expression of impersonal fact is not an adequate criterion of meaningfulness, because once accepted, that criterion would directly lead to the impossibility of any judgment concerning values, whenever the problem of quality is involved, and this is an absurd and unacceptable consequence. Moreover, the evidence of cogito consists in fact not so much in that it presents an indubitable objective fact about the thinking subject; rather, the origin of the evidence is the feeling of ownership of experience, which is the hallmark of the first person. Therefore, the coherence and comprehensibility of Descartes’ cogito can be defended on the ground of the inherent consistency of the first-personal point of view.

 Having buttressed the truth of the being of the thinking subject, we followed Descartes to advance to the principal idea the subject possesses. That is the idea of God. In the meantime, we also developed a second line of thought that seeks to prevent Husserl’s phenomenology from lapsing into a quasi-solipsistic idealism, a result that is viewed by most of the questioners as a fatal defect to the first-personal approach. This critique of Husserlian phenomenology is mounted by Patočka. Admittedly, the decisive move Husserl has made in his transcendental turn of phenomenology is to extend the regime of phenomenological reduction to include the world as it is in itself, the world as a whole. That is to say, through a series of scrutiny, Husserl has been finally led to the conclusion that there is simply no more evidence of the givenness of the world than any particular object that is posited by consciousness. Therefore, it is necessary for the operation of phenomenological reduction to suspend the transcendence of the world as well and seeks to reduce it to transcendental subjectivity. Nevertheless, for Patočka, that move is unjustified. This is because the attempt to reduce the world to something more evident, more original, must tacitly assimilate the world either to a thing or to the sum total of the things. However, with a more precise and comprehensive description of the world, Patočka exhibits decisively the nature of the world as horizon, and shows successfully that the world as horizon is never to be reduced, but is itself always and already given with absolute evidence. Therefore, Husserl’s transcendental turn is refuted on the ground of this new conception of the world as horizon. Furthermore, to our surprise, this conception is actually not entirely new. As we have argued, already in Descartes’ Third Meditation, the conception of the world as horizon had been foreseen in the name of God. By a detour of a painstaking analysis of the objective reality of idea, Descartes succeeds in proving the existence of God. And, from our point of view, this close examination of the content of the idea of God is equivalent to an unfolding of the way the world as horizon is given in the first person. More importantly, as a result, we have shown that Descartes’ proof of the existence of God can be best understood, if we take that proof to be a validation, which results from the first-personal perspective, from the thinking subject who endeavors to stay as close as possible to the content of his consciousness and tries to describe it thoroughly, of the actuality and truth of the world as horizon. Thus, our two lines of thoughts converged. Whereas Patočka’s critique of transcendental phenomenology issues directly from a more adequate understanding of the world as horizon, this understanding, at least on the first sight, seems to have no special bearing on the first person, and therefore renders it difficult to see immediately how it is related to the tradition of phenomenology; on the other hand, Descartes’ proof of the existence of God indeed paves the path for us to see clearly how the thinking subject, through a series of concrete first-personal experience, can be led to the revelation of the idea of God, of the infinite, the world as horizon, as a given transcendence. Hence, eventually, we arrive at a position to view the essence of the world and its relation to us more clearly.

 What follows from this phenomenology of transcendence?

 Like everybody else, in my life experience, I often find that there is something wrong with my cognition. And more than often I notice that there is an abyss between ideality and reality, between how I believe things ought to be and how things “really” are. Still, a more general realization of mine is that while I live and in this living gain more and more, I nonetheless necessarily lose whatever that used to be possessed by me. To sum up, these experiences can be embraced under a common notion, that is, the “negativity” of life. Our erroneous cognition can be negated; our expectation of the way things should be can be negated; even they effort we make to keep whatever that is good and beautiful in life might be similarly negated. Therefore, one would ask: Does these actual experiences of negation not point in each and every dimension in our lives to the very same thing－the absence of God? How is mistake, injustice, or even regret possible if God exist?

We have every reason to believe that the same must have befallen Descartes and each one of the phenomenologists we have discussed. And in this regard, we may once again entrust ourselves to the implications of the insight of phenomenology of transcendence. According to our previous study, God, as the world and as a horizon, due to its indubitable evidence, must necessarily be an absolute positivity. And on the ground of this positivity, we should understand the negativity above mentioned from a new angle. To repeat, the world as horizon is not in itself a thing, and it is not the sum total of all things. Therefore, even though this horizon is always real, it can never be exhausted by our cognition of it, and it cannot be given in phenomena once and for all. In other words, one of the determinations of that absolute positivity is that it must comprise those moments which we could never or no longer grasp fully, the moments that are incomprehensible; these moments, from the viewpoint of the above questionings, are exactly what we label generally as “negativity”. In this sense, in so far as negativity is nothing more than a determination of positivity, and absence but a mode of presence, to the degree that cognition shall always proceed, to the degree that our practice must be developed further and further, and life goes on, negativity will be recognized as non-being, as no genuine state of affairs; on the contrary, it can only be regarded as an aspect of the process of our cognition and engagement of objects which are petrified and over-emphasized from the impersonal perspective of objectivism. In opposition to the existence of God, nothingness simply does not exist. And the positivity of Being would never fall into the abyss of nothingness precisely because in its essence, Being, God or the world as a whole is not posited against the background of nothingness and therefore is not possible to return to nothing. On the contrary, it is from the very start a negation of non-being, a negation of negativity, an emergence that can never be interrupted, without beginning and without end. God is there where our life is.

Furthermore, as phenomena, this ever-lasting emergence presupposes a certain kind of subjectivity, that is to say, a subject for whom the world as a whole can never be given at once, a subject who can never exhaust Being. In other words, it would be a subject whose vision is limited, whose action is restricted and whose will defied. A threefold determination of subjectivity therefore necessarily follows.

First, the subject is the body. And as a body, this subject is not what Husserl conceives as “pure consciousness”. This is because in order for the subject’s endless encounter with the world to begin, to get a starting point, the consciousness need be incarnated to the effect that any subject capable of making the world as whole his infinite horizon must engage this world from a certain point of view, from within the world. To acquire such a viewpoint, then, it is necessary for the subject to possess a position in the world, to be located under the spatial-temporal framework. That is to say, the subject is always a situated subject, and as such is necessarily a body. That is how any first-personal experience, be it sensing or feeling, perception or thinking, is possible. And this condition of possibility is also inscribed in the mystery that the seer is simultaneously the visible. In this sense, seeing the world is to see ourselves there in it, together with it, and the moment we encounter our own selves, through the mediation of sensations, of feelings and emotions, of a variety of qualities the world has prepared for us, we see that that very encounter is nothing less than an event of experience of the world. To be sure, it is already an experience of the transcendence.

Secondly, the subject is life. That is to say, rather than stiff, numb, inactive and unproductive, the subject as body must be capable of interacting with the world, of stimulating and responding, of inspiration and expiration, of nutrition, growth, movement and change. As we have seen, the world as a whole is the negation of negativity, and as such comprises negativity as a necessary moment within the absolute positivity, absence within presence. From the viewpoint of the subject’s experience, that very structure is precisely what constitutes the infinity of the world. Now, this experience of the infinite is not possible without the animation of the subject as life. For without life, without experience of the interchange between rest and movement, action and reaction and so on, there would be no way for the subject to distinguish the presence from the absence, the negative from the positive. And as a result, there should be no experience of the world as infinity. Therefore, in order for the world to be the world, the veritable transcendence that allows for the subject’s ever-lasting involvement and exploration, the subject must live itself in and by the world, as an animate being.

Finally, the subject is desire. To see this, we must realize through and through that desire is not need. To be sure, we all need a shelter to protect ourselves from exterior hazard and menace, and this shelter needs entrance and exit to allow us to pass, to get in and go out. But, nothing is there to dictate the color of our door. And, desire is born the moment the subject decides to paint his door red, rather than green or yellow. The true wonder of the subject is that in the course of his incessant interaction with the world, the subject’s need is always and already mediated by something else. As life that necessarily seeks to satisfy its need, searching for the fulfillment of the condition of possibility for its survival, the subjects nonetheless never eats, but tastes; he will never move, but exercises; he does not look, but see; and he could not merely utter sounds, without speaking with his own voice. As Jaques Lacan famously remarks, desire is the desire of the Other. For, desire is not at all pure and simple, as any vital need immediately is. On the contrary, desire as it is in itself is never meant to be satisfied, can never be terminated to an end－to the point where the subject may one day be in a position to claim sincerely that he lives without a desire to live－due to the infinite mediation involved in the mechanism of desire. And, it is precisely that process of infinite mediation alone which is capable of endowing upon the infinity of the world a genuine sense. Therefore, if we think radically enough the nature and essence of the world as a whole, as horizon, as the infinite mediation which constantly transcends our need and turns it into desire, if we dare to continue this meditation on and on, we will, I believe, be firmly led to recognize the true face of the subject, and, accordingly, be ready and willing to take the responsibility of the subject as desire. We will be ready to love. For the world is there meant for us to love.

 Now, based on the threefold determination of the subject, I conclude that this thesis must be seen as no more than a preparatory work. To follow the line of thought we have tried to develop along the way, many further questions should be asked. According to the determination we derive, what then is the nature of subjectivity? What is the position of the subject in the structure of the infinite mediation of the Other? Or, what is a phenomenology of body? And how can recognition of the necessity of the body contribute to phenomenology, especially to a phenomenology of art, in the realm of which the first-personal experience of the body enjoys the supreme status? Moreover, could there be a phenomenology of Desire? And how is it going to be different from, or assimilated to, psychoanalysis? And we might expect that these questions will lead us to a productive conversation with the tradition equally rich and fascinating as philosophy itself, a discipline founded by another grand master, Sigmund Freud－psychoanalysis, whose intimate intercourse with philosophy remains mostly until today ignored, hopefully not out of philosophy’s arrogance.