#robert sokolowski

[anaxerneas]

It requires intelligence to break the bind of customary sentential forms and to "say the same thing" in a fresh way. We can form sentences when we have learned to speak a language; we frame judgments when we have become able to think in a language.

Thinking transcends language in the sense that if we have come to judge distinctly in one language we will be able to do so in any other language once we control the vocabulary; it does not transcend language in the sense that it can continually occur with no involvement of language at all. There can be thought that in fact manifests itself in nonlinguistic behavior, but it can usually find some words to express itself.

Robert Sokolowski, "The Presence of Judgment"

[maaarine]

Phenomenology of the Human Person (Robert Sokolowski, 2008)

“Suppose a topic is introduced and people discuss it. They go on saying more and more about it.

Gradually or suddenly, the people involved in the conversation come to recognize a difference between those who know what they are talking about, who know what the thing truly is and what belongs to it in itself,

and those who seem to wander all over the place, who show by what they say (and by what they do) that they are confusing the thing with something else, or that they are confusing what the thing necessarily is with what it just happens to be.

The first group of speakers have grasped the essentials of the thing, but the second have not. (…)

In other words: once we start to distinguish essentials from coincidentals, once we start to distinguish between properties and accidentals, we also begin to identify a ‘‘one’’ or an ‘‘entity’’ behind the properties as that from which they flow.

We might be wrong, of course; we might be paranoid or hasty in seeing a pattern of properties; there may, in fact, be nothing behind the ‘‘properties’’ we thought we were perceiving; they may, in fact, not be properties at all. (…)

When we recognize a leopard, we do not know merely its shape and its spots; we know that it will run after prey and that it will digest the food that it eats, even though it may not be doing these things when we perceive it.

The powers or potentialities are paramount in the thing and in our thinking about it.

Recognizing what the thing is, is precisely the formulation of a definition that gives the root for all of these powers, potential and actualized, known and unknown. (…)

The thing always retains a potential of disclosure, and hence the thing always remains somewhat mysterious and unknown.

To know fully the essence of a thing, we would have to be able to predict everything the thing could be, in all the contexts into which it might be placed; how could we ever acquire such a wholesale grasp of what the thing is?”

[anaxerneas]

Formal elements in a judgment find their expression in the grammatical parts of language. These may be separate words, or inflections in the lexicon, or the position of the word in a sentence. Such grammatical expressions are not used to name; they do not refer to objects or to features in objects. As words or aspects of words, they are more like imperatives. They signal us to perform certain categorial actions: "and" tells us to conjoin; "but" tells us to posit something with an expectation of a certain consequence, then to posit another consequence counter to the one we expected. Someone who masters a language is resourceful in exploiting, for communication, persuasion, or delight, the many articulations which it permits.

But what kind of imperative is a grammatical term? It is not like a normal command to do something, for there the action to be performed is different from the command and from understanding the command. To fix the carburetor is different from either saying or hearing the order to do so. But to conjoin when we hear "and" is not to do anything except understand what we hear. And the speaker who utters "and" does not signal his auditors to do anything which he does not do himself, provided he is thinking while he speaks, or provided at least that he thought when he prepared his speech. The categorial action is not separated from its signal. But it is distinct from its signal, and the expression can sometimes be achieved – in vague, passive speaking or hearing – without the distinct achievement of the categorial action.

Every speech has at least this much rhetorical purpose: to make its auditors perform the thinking that is signal-led by the grammar of its sentences. This minimal effect is less than persuading the auditors to believe what is said, since understanding is a condition for belief.

In solitary thinking, the limiting case of speech, the speaker turns rhetorically to himself and, guided by the resources of his own language, encourages himself to carry out the actions which his words announce. In such a soliloquy, of course, we do not have a fully established rhetor addressing an audience; rhetor and addressee are only incipiently constituted...The speech once spoken will then become available as a signal for the same performance in other speakers.

Thinking in a language always supposes a substrate of vague formulations, received senses, and problems lingering in the mind. These passive rhetorical suggestions are the margin within which thoughts take shape.

Robert Sokolowski, "The Presence of Judgment"

[anaxerneas]

[anaxerneas]

My claim is that there can be subjects and predicates, there can be predication, "the very core of universal syntax," because, through the use of words, an object can be brought before a speaker and listener as an object of reference, and an aspect of that object can be differentiated and registered in it. There can be predication because we can interact in certain ways, not because our minds or brains function privately or organically in certain ways.

The public character of predication is brought out by the Latin etymology of the term. The word praedicare, which means "to make known, proclaim, declare," is made up of the adverb or preposition prae, "before, in the face of, in view of," and the verb dicare, "to show, to indicate." To predicate is to let something show up before an audience, and when this is done, as it normally is, in the medium of words, it is to speak out about something "before" others.

The term predicare can also mean to mention something in a special way, and so the modern term predicate can also mean an honorable mention, as in the German, when a vintage wine is dubbed "Qualitätswein mit Prädikat." In this spirit, we might wish to say of someone that he has "gotten his predicate" when he has become notorious for having done something spectacular, whether grand or foolish. Displays like these do not occur in solitude.

Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person

[anaxerneas]

It is strange enough that we can conceive of things that cannot exist, but it is supremely curious that we can wish for things even while knowing that they are impossible. The wishing in question might sometimes be a merely idle thing - we might casually think, "Well, it would be nice if that were to happen" - but it can also be a deep and powerful desire, a yearning for what we know cannot be.

Such longing for the impossible, furthermore, is not a result of confusion; it is not a matter of being mistaken, of taking something as possible when it really is not. That would not really be wishing for the impossible, because we in our confusion would be taking it as something that could be done, by others if not by ourselves. Rather, we know clearly and certainly that the thing cannot be attained by anyone, and still we can and do wish for it. We might, for example, wish that we were younger, or that we would never get sick, or that we had not taken some action that we did in fact commit. We can live "somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high." Some of us spend a lot of time thinking about such things and singing about them. Many popular songs propose unattainable things to us: with great fanfare and drama, we are encouraged to "dream the impossible dream." Classical music, lieder and operas, do the same thing in their own way, and fables, legends, movies, musicals, and advertisements all present appealing situations that we know could never be.

This sort of wishing has something bittersweet about it, a Sehnsucht for things we know cannot be possessed. It exposes us to what can be wanted but never enjoyed. Why do we waste our time wishing for the impossible? Why don't we limit our rational wanting to things within our power? It seems that we need this sort of wishing to provide the outermost context of our practical world. It is the boundary that serves as the foil for the wished-for satisfactions that can be realized, by others or by ourselves: wishes that can be fulfilled seem to need wishes that cannot be fulfilled for their definition. It seems that our rational appetite - not just our reason, but our appetite also - needs to stretch beyond the range of its own effectiveness, in order to define the region where it can be effective.

Only a rational being, someone who can intend things in their radical absence, could wish for impossibilities. Animals are not subject to that kind of longing; they are more matter-of-fact in what they want. Animals could never want something that is impossible, because they would be unable to conceive it. This kind of wishing, idle as it might seem, does reveal our rationality.

Wishing for the impossible is, in fact, something of an overreach, but one that we cannot avoid and would not want to be without.

Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person

[anaxerneas]

There is a play of presence and absence in the experience of signs. While we intend the sign in a filled or saturated way, we emptily intend what it indicates; while we have the presence of the sign, we experience, we have, the absence of what it indicates. It is not just that the indicated is not there for us; it is meant as not there, as only indicated by the sign. And in this play of presence and absence, only one thing is meant, the object indicated, and there is always the possibility, in principle, of having the absent object later experienced directly in its own presence. But when this object comes to presence... it comes to presence as that which was once indicated. It does not lose this character of having been the object of a sign.

Robert Sokolowski, "Ontological Possibilities in Phenomenology: The Dyad and the One" (emphasis mine for clarity)

It seems this Husserlian perspective offers an alternative to the view where a sign is simply "thrown away" the very moment we are in the presence of its object, as a number of discussions in semiotics seem to assume. Even the common definition of a sign as a "substitute" for its object seems a bit inadequate in light of this view (not simply wrong though, I don't think?).

In the Husserlian Meditations, after a rather technical discussion of relevant passages from Husserl's Logical Investigations, Sokolowski offers another summary I think worth posting.

Objects are present to mind only as mediated by their absence. Mind's capacity to intend its object signitively - usually in language but also with other signs and symbols - means that it can dislodge itself from its objects and still "mean' or "have" them. It can think about them in their absence. Then it returns to the obiects and its direct enjoyment of them in a distanced adhesion. The work of mind, consciousness, is the process of having these identities in the appropriate synthesis of presence and absence.

^ still, going back to passages like this, I see how he's emphasizing a transcendental view where the person qua subject functions primarily as a "transparent eyeball" or prism for phenomena. I've expressed some doubts about this "primacy of presentation" and whether it falls prey to the descriptive fallacy, with too much of a focus on our "setting forth" things in propositional statements. But again, I think that would be an issue of inadequacy rather than outright falsity.

[anaxerneas]

Robert Sokolowski, "The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions"