9.5.5—
The Objective Self and the Transcendental Ego
An even more radical variation on the same sort of claim is, I think, to be found in the writings of Kant, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. These writers seem to note that every intentional thought requires an analysis that involves at least three features: (1) a thinker (the "transcendental ego"), (2) a content (meaning, or Sinn ), and (3) an object aimed at (the "intentional object"). However, it is important to note—as Kant, Wittgenstein, and Husserl do and many other writers do not—that these "features" in the analysis of intentional states do not function in experience as three things, but as aspects or features of a seamless unity . Wittgenstein expresses this as follows in the Tractatus:
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Husserl similarly speaks of intentional experience as a unity encompassing subject, meaning, and object. He writes that
the experiencing Ego is still nothing that might be taken for itself and made into an object of inquiry on its own account. Apart from its "ways of being related" or "ways of behaving," it is completely empty of essential components, it has no content that could be unravelled, it is in and for itself indescribable: pure Ego and nothing further. (Ideas §80)
Kant likewise speaks of the transcendental ego only in the context of the transcendental unity of apperception—that is, the possibility of the "I think" accompanying every possible thought (Critique of Pure Reason, Sec. 2, §16, B131).
The reason this distinction seems important is that, if writers like Wittgenstein and Husserl are right, the great divide lies not so much between mental and physical objects as between discourse about the (logical) structure of experience and discourse about objects generally (including thoughts treated as objects). On this view, when one comes to a proper understanding of thinking, what one finds there are not several interrelated things (the self, the intentional state, the content, and the object-as-intended), but a single act of thinking that has a certain logical structure that involves it being (a ) the thinking of some subject (b ) aiming at some object (c ) by way of a certain content being intended under a certain modality. It is possible, of course, to perform an act of analysis whereby one directs one's attention separately to self, content, modality, and intentional object. And when one does that, each of these things comes to occupy the "object" slot of another intentional act. Indeed, from the perspective of the analysis of experience, what it is to be an object is to be a possible occupant of the object-slot of an intentional act .[9] But if this is so, then the logical structure of intentional states is in some sense logically prior to the notion of object, and the tags 'experiencing self', 'content', and 'object', as they are applied to moments or aspects of experiencing, are not names of interrelated objects. Indeed, they are not objects and hence are not related (since relations can only relate objects).[10]
Now if this is right, the task of relating objectival and experiential discourse becomes all the harder: relations are things that obtain between objects. If the "I" and the content that appear in experiential analysis do not appear there as objects, there can be no question of relating them to things appearing in discourse about objects. There can be no question of objectival-experiential relations, because in the experiential analysis,
the experiencing "I" and the content do not appear as objects at all. Nor is it possible to "cash out" the logical structure of intentional experience in terms of relations between objects, for reasons already described. (Or, as Husserl suggests, at least doing so necessarily involves a distortion of one's subject matter.) The only other way to bridge the Cartesian divide between mind and nature, it would seem, would be to find a way to subsume objectival discourse within experiential discourse, as Husserl tries to do in his transcendental phenomenology. I shall not pursue this possibility here, but shall point out that it seems right in at least one regard: namely, that intentional character is in a certain way conceptually anterior to the notion of an object in the world. For it is the content of an intentional state that lays down the satisfaction conditions determining what kind of object or state of affairs would have to exist in order for the state to be fulfilled. It is the content "unicorn" that specifies what criteria something would have to fulfill to be a real unicorn, and not vice versa. (It is, of course, possible simply to live with the dissatisfying result that there is an unbridgeable gap between two disparate realms of discourse. To those uneasy with such a gulf, I heartily recommend a careful consideration of the kind of combination of transcendental idealism and transcendental realism advocated by Husserl.)