Early in the last century, Husserl adopted a "Cartesian" approach to the foundation of science that he based on the presence or givenness of phenomena to intuition. Within the last decade, Daniel Dennett has developed a theory of consciousness that challenged Descartes’ notion of intuition on the grounds there are no real seemings. It would therefore appear that the two would be diametrically opposed to each other. It only seems that way, or at least, that is the thesis I will defend in this paper. My claim will be that the apparent opposition occurs only when both "seeming" and "presence" are construed in a nonconstructive manner, as they traditionally are. I will argue that Dennett and Husserl creatively reinterpret these two key terms as modes of construction. When so understood, apparent opposition between the two thinkers on this point disappears. The real significance of the discussion, however, doesn’t lie in the apparent dispute between our two authors: Fundamental constructive reconceptualizations of mind, consciousness and reality are at stake.

I will proceed by offering a brief exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology, followed by an overview of Dennett’s philosophy of consciousness. Then I will compare them under two headings, Qualia and Presence, before adding a conclusion about the significance of the issue.

EXPOSITION OF HUSSERL

In the natural, pre-philosophical attitude, we take it for granted that the things we perceive in the world are real. From the first stirrings of philosophy however, as early as Thales, we have distinguished between the reality of things as they are in themselves and the appearances which they present to us. It appears to us that the sun rises, but in reality it is the earth that turns. In reality, this table is composed mostly of empty space between molecules, but it seems to us to be solid. How things appear depends on our perspective, that is, on our perceptual systems, our position, our size, and so on. The term "reality," in contrast, refers to how things are in themselves, how they are without regard to perspective, or in other words, how they would be for a being without spatial, temporal or perceptual limitations – that is, for God, or for a purely rational scientist.

Suspending our implicit thesis of reality is no easy task, and many errors about the nature of consciousness stem from various unnoticed failures to fully suspend this thesis. Husserl’s epoché is to be applied to all reality, not just physical reality. Thus I can describe my experience of a triangle as having three absolutely straight sides without either committing myself to the reality of a Platonic eidos of triangle or denying it. My description of hearing a Beethoven symphony does not involve me adopting or rejecting any theory about the musical reality of the symphony itself over beyond any performance of it. Any belief I have in the reality of mental processes must be as thoroughly suspended as my belief in the physical. For example, if I appear to myself to be depressed, it is the phenomenon of the depression I must describe, even if some psychologist, on the basis of objective tests, declares my real mental state to be one of euphoria.

The failure to suspend the reality of the mental may show itself in a common misinterpretation of Husserl. Some people think that Husserl’s appearances or phenomena are mental. That is, since the pure appearance of the chair is not physically real, they conclude that it must be mentally real; that is, it must be a thing in my mind. But the belief in the reality of my mind and of things in it must also be suspended by the reduction. In describing the chair as it is given to me, I describe it as it appears, namely over there across the room, not here in my head.

The problem is analogous to that of the person whose only carpentry tool is a hammer and so everything looks like a nail to them. If our only philosophical category is "self-contained thing" or substance, then everything must be stuffed into that straitjacket. Let me call this error "thingification," a word that has the sole virtue that you will not easily forget it!

The most flagrant perpetrator of this error is, of course, Descartes himself. Descartes thingifies the objects of consciousness into "ideas" on the basis of his slogan that the mind can only be in contact with itself. Convinced that the mind cannot reach out to physical reality, he substitutes representative ideas as intermediaries. He then invokes God as the guarantor of the relationship between ideas and the objects in the world that they represent. I will label this position "representativism." Ideas, he claims, have content – their objective being – but they also have formal being – that is, they are things in the mind. Representativism is a form of thingification, of reification. Since appearances can have no physical reality, they must be reality of a different sort – "mental reality," thinks Descartes (mistakenly, according to Husserl).

Husserl’s reduction would have us suspend belief in all reality, whether it be physical, mathematical, Platonic, musical or mental. An appearance is not a thing, physical or mental, and any reality it may claim to have is to be suspended. "Substance," "thing," and "reality" are concepts unsuited to the description of consciousness within the epoché.

Similarly there is no place for any "theory" of reality. In describing phenomena we must not only suspend any question about their reality, we must also suspend any theoretical beliefs which we have, philosophical or scientific, about the phenomena. One of the most pervasive beliefs in modern science and philosophy since the 16th century is atomism. Atomism is the belief, endemic to mechanistic philosophy, that the world is made up of simple parts and is to be explained in terms of these parts. Whether or not this is an adequate theory of the physical world, Husserl’s method requires that we suspend the theory if we are to give an unbiased description of our experience.

David Hume, for example, claims that consciousness starts with simple impressions. Husserl maintains that, far from describing what we actually experience, Hume is importing a scientific theory about the nature of material reality into his description of consciousness. An unbiased description of what we are given, claims Husserl, would show that we experience structured objects rather than simple impressions. We do not perceive a red impression; we perceive a soft red carpet.

Husserl’s claim that what we are given are not simple, atomic sensations but structured, meaningful objects is, of course, his thesis of the intentionality of consciousness; consciousness is always of or about objects (in a very wide sense of "object"). But there is a danger still that if we don’t enforce the reduction carefully we may fall back into thingification. The experienced chair – that is, the intentional chair – is not a chair in a self-contained manner; its sense goes beyond the individual object. To be a chair, the object must fit into the wider structure of tables, floors, rooms, human sitting and, more generally, into our whole meaningful world. An individual chair in isolation could not have the sense "chair." I could not mean something as a chair – it couldn’t be experienced as a chair-for-me – without me implicitly co-meaning its context, its background, that is, the "world." In the natural attitude we think of each chair as an in-itself, and the world as a collection of such entities. Once the epoché suspends our belief in reality, the chair as experienced cannot be properly described without reference to the "world" in Husserl’s special technical sense as the ultimate horizon of all meaning.

To summarize, Husserl’s project, to find an absolutely certain foundation for knowledge, requires that there be nothing more to phenomena than how they appear to me, how they are given to me, how they are present to me. In particular, they can have no substantiality, no self-containedness, no reality, no in-themselfness; they must be pure sense, pure for-me. They are nothing but what I constitute them to be.

Dan Dennett’s ultimate aim is entirely different from Husserl’s. He shows no interest in establishing science on a firm foundation or finding rigorously certain knowledge. His project is to explain consciousness, that is, to offer an account of consciousness on the basis of natural science, which he takes for granted. In this attempt, he stakes out a middle ground between, on the one side, the eliminativists and reductionists who think that in the final analysis there is no such thing as consciousness to be explained and that our only task should be to explain it away, and, on the other side, those, such as Descartes and the New Mysterians, who think that a scientific explanation of consciousness is inconceivable.

One of the main functions of the heterophenomenological method for Dennett is to drive a wedge between how things seem to the reporter and any theory the reporter might have about how they come to seem that way – that is, their causes. In the example above, for instance, some people claim that since there is no moving dot in the world, there must be an inner screen or stage on which the moving dot appears – what Dennett labels ‘the Cartesian theatre.’ For a dualist, this theatre is the mental space where ideas or representatives of reality are present before the inner eye of the mind. But Dennett thinks that not only dualists but many materialists also presuppose that there is some one point (in the brain, for materialists) where everything comes together to be presented to consciousness. The central thesis of Dennett’s work, Consciousness Explained, is to reject this theory of the Cartesian theatre, while preserving the authority of the reporter over how things seem to her.

Dennett’s overall project is to explain consciousness, not explain it away. He maintains that his rejection of the category of the objective subjective, of real seeming, is compatible with the absolute authority of the reporter with respect to her heterophenomenological world. How things seem to a reporter is exactly how they are in her heterophenomenological world. His rejection of the claim that there are mental entities which are presented to us on the Cartesian theatre is not a denial that things seem to us in a certain way; it is not a denial that there is consciousness, only a rejection of the conception of consciousness as the observing of a mental reality.

Now let me move to my main point: Husserl’s description of phenomena as present to subjectivity and Dennett’s rejection of real seemings share a common understanding of mental reality and of the nature of consciousness.

The common opposition that Husserl and Dennett have to the notion of mental reality can be seen most clearly in their rejection of the Humean notion of impressions – or, as they are called in recent analytic circles, qualia.

Dennett rejects the qualophile argument by challenging the claim that we are capable of imagining such scenarios in detail. In an ingenious examination of the inverted spectrum thought experiment, Dennett argues that we cannot isolate pure qualia from the network of dispositions within which they are experienced. The assumption that we can is another instance of belief in the Cartesian theatre. According to Dennett’s own Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness, colour stimuli on the retina go to many different parts of the brain and give rise to dispositions to respond and act in various ways – including, of course, to react verbally by labeling the experience. There is no one Cartesian screen on which a quale could be inverted once and for all. He puts the following words into the mouth of his interlocutor, Otto:

Dennett’s move here, once we make allowances for his naturalism, is very similar to Husserl’s attacked on atomism. Qualia are, after all, just the modern instantiation of Hume’s simple impressions. Husserl’s objection is that all unities of consciousness take their sense from their context, their world, from what they mean for us. It may seem at first sight – that is, before the epoché suspends the natural attitude – that there are sensations such as colours which are like individual things-in-themselves within the mind, which are just there whether we notice them or not (visible perhaps to God?). A full phenomenological description within the reduction, however, shows that what we actually experience are colours attributed to objects which in turn fit into the larger horizon of sense.

The problem here is an inadequate description of what it is to be given or to be present to consciousness. Hume misunderstands presence as punctual, as if only an undivided point in space or time can be directly experienced – a misunderstanding he inherits from Descartes, as my masthead quotation shows. For Husserl, to say that a phenomenon is present to my consciousness is to say that it has a sense for me, a meaning. A particular phenomenon is present before me as a chair, that is, it has the meaning "chair" for me. But a "chair" is not just a point of colour or a set of points of colour; it has a structure that is three-dimensional and dispersed in space and time. It must, for example, have another invisible side that is related to my ability to walk around it and perceive it from another perspective. Similarly, a phenomenon that occupies only an instant in time could not be a chair; the sense "chair-for-me" correlates essentially to my disposition to repeat the perception of it at a later time. Part of the sense of "chair" is its role in life, its function of supporting me when I sit down. As a meaning unity, the chair as phenomenon is given against a horizon, the background of the world, which is related to my capacities for action and perception. According to Husserl, an adequate description of the experience of a chair requires that we describe its presence as a dispersed structure and not as atomistic, instantaneous, and punctual, as Hume misunderstood it.

Of course, unlike Husserl, Dennett is a naturalist. His dispositions are cognitive processes in the brain that causally explain why things seem to us the way they do. Husserl is a transcendentalist. His horizon of sense is a non-natural – that is, a non-causal – structure of meaning relationships. Nevertheless they agree that consciousness is not a matter of some simple, real entity, a quale or an impression, just being there, juxta-posed to the mind’s eye. To be conscious of something is to integrate it into our world.

I think the similarity of Husserl’s and Dennett’s arguments about impressions and qualia is based on an even more fundamental agreement: They both agree that a fundamental mistake is made if consciousness is conceptualized as mental reality. What is this mistaken concept of consciousness? It is the notion that the contents of consciousness are really present.

In the natural attitude, common sense understands vision as a relationship between the observer and an observed thing that is real. "Real" here means that the existence of the object is independent of the observer or of the observing. Our natural attitude towards a seen object is that it is a thing-in-itself that is present in so far as it occupies a place in space and a moment in time. It would be there even if it were not observed, and its presence to the observer is an external, real and causal relationship which occurs by happenstance, as it were, because the observer happens on the scene. The thing is present like a bump on a log! This kind of presence is contrasted with absence. If a chair is not present in the room, then it is absent from the room. The notions are exclusive: a thing cannot be both present and absent, at least not in the same place and time. Indeed, it is the unity of space and time that defines this kind of presence, so we might perhaps call this "punctual presence," or "juxta-presence." A chair is juxta-present in the room because the chair and the room share the same space and time. In this, optically-based way of thinking, a thing is present to an observer in so far as the two happen to be juxtaposed in space at the same time.

The visual metaphor involves the following implications: there is an object, the eye, which is doing the seeing; the eye offers only one perspective from among many; the object itself cannot be identified with any perspective, that is, there is more to it than appears, in other words, it has reality beyond its appearance. It is exactly this structure that is captured by the Cartesian theatre and by the Cartesian notion of an idea. The problem with such Cartesian or punctual presence – juxta-presence – is that it is conceived of as an objective relation. It is an external, causal relationship. No one has to do anything for a thing to be juxta-present.

However appropriate this analysis may be for visual perception, it leads to problems when it is used metaphorically as "mental presence." The epitome of such punctual, juxta-presence is, of course, the Humean impression; the impression is present just by being in the right (mental) place and time. I think that Husserl too, in his description of consciousness, is initially influenced by metaphors taken from vision. In speaking of the givenness or presence of an object to consciousness, he uses terms such as seeing (sehen), intuition, (intellectual) vision, etc. But these terms imported from visual perception carry with them some heavy baggage which Husserl wants to reject: the reality-appearance distinction; the notion that the observer is an object; an understanding of reality as non-perspectival, as independent of the observer; and, especially, the interpretation of presence as spatio-temporal proximity. These are all ultimately misleading since they imply that the only way an object can be validly seen is when the object is really there before me, that is, when we share a unity of space and time. The visual metaphor carries with it the implication that presence to consciousness refers to real presence or juxta-presence.

What Dennett says is very similar:

The Cartesian mistake is to try to understand the experience of presence, the representation of presence, in terms of direct acquaintance with a reality within consciousness. Whether Cartesians be dualists or materialists, they are stuck with a misconception of presence as things all coming together somewhere and at some time, i.e., juxta-presence. (There may here be a covert reliance on God, or some Absolute Subject, who is always there for mental reality to be present to, even when no human subject is conscious of it.) For Dennett there is no point in the brain where things all come together. Rather there are content fixations in different places and times throughout the brain that result in us having the series of beliefs about things which constructs our heterophenomenological world. There is nothing "real" to presence; there is only the seeming. That’s what consciousness is.

How things seem for us – that is, in Husserlian terms, how objects are (phenomenologically) present to consciousness – is what we believe them to be, that is, how we take them to be. For Dennett, things seem to us to be present as a result of "judgments" or content fixations. For Husserl, objects are present to consciousness in so far as consciousness has constituted them with a sense. For Dennett the heterophenomenological world of seemings has a coherent, integrated structure because each of the brain’s content fixations occurs within a vast network of other fixations, dispositions, memories and purposes. For Husserl, an object has a sense only insofar as it is embedded in a background, the horizon of the world, that is, our total network of meanings. Of course, the constitution of sense by Husserl’s transcendental ego, or even by transcendental intersubjectivity, seems a far cry from the construction of the heterophenomenological world by fixations of content due to causal, neural networks in the brain. In reality, however, the two analyses are not as different as they appear.

I wish to emphasize once again, in conclusion, the radical disparity between Husserl’s project and Dennett’s project. Husserl sets out to find a solid foundation for science in the investigation of consciousness. Dennett wants to explain consciousness on the basis of science. What they have in common is their conception of the nature of consciousness, or at the very least, their agreement about what consciousness is not. The naive notion – that we are conscious of mental realities – shared by common sense, science, Descartes and much philosophical debate, is rejected by both of Husserl and Dennett. There is nothing "real" in consciousness, says Husserl; there is only how things appear to us. That is, as Dennett puts it, there are no real seemings.

2. R. Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, tr. E. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1911, Vol. 1, Meditation II. Since Descartes believes that extended substance depends upon God, this way of putting it is not quite correct. Perhaps he would have done better to say that something is real or substantial insofar as it is considered from the viewpoint of God.

3. Husserl, Ideas, Book I, p. 204.

  4. D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1991, pp. 72-78.

  5. Ibid., p. 96.

  6. Ibid., p. 97.

  7. Ibid., p. 365.

  8. Ibid., p. 134.

  9. Ibid., p. 134.

  10. Ibid., p. 364.

  11. Ibid., p. 316.

  12. Ibid., p. 132.

  13. Ibid., p. 393.

  14. Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly, 32 (1982), pp. 127-136.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., p. 389.

  18. His struggle is highlighted, but seriously confused by Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison, Northwestern University Press, 1973. A much more successful interpretation is offered by Lilian S. Alweiss, "The Presence of Husserl," Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 30 (1999), pp. 59-75.

  19. Of course, within the epoché we must be careful not to misunderstand this meaning-bestowing Ego as itself any kind of reality, any kind of thing (or substance) – as Descartes mistakenly thinks. It is not the "empirical ego" – my self as a real object that Psychology might study – but the "Transcendental" Ego whose acts constitute or construct what I experience.

  20. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 359.