Page 331 - Contribution To Phenomenology

324 DAVID CARR

them is still open to skeptical doubts. But Hume is able both to express
such doubts and to devaluate them at the same time, urging us to plunge
ahead with our causal investigations of the world whether or not we are
sure that it exists and that its causal order is universal and necessary.
Once we assume both points, the scientific investigation of nature can
proceed, unhindered by epistemological qualms—^which of course it was
doing anyway, as we know. But given the assumption of the universality
of the causal order, all being must belong to that order, including mental
being. The contents of the mind must be considered entities or events
which are related to the rest of nature according to causal principles. It
would be even more convenient, of course, if we could eliminate their
apparently non-spatial character by reducing them to or deriving them
from the physical states of the brain and nervous system. For those
actually engaged in the natural causal investigation of human nature, such
a reduction is nothing less than a solemn obligation, a promise that must
be kept.
But this is to jump ahead. We should pause to appreciate the acute
malaise in which philosophy found itself at the apogee of the enlighten-
ment, thanks to Hume. The bold attempt to validate our knowledge of
the external world on first-person, reflective principles, inaugurated by
Descartes, had collapsed; the mind, conversant only with its own ideas,
could find no sure way beyond them. Berkeley tried to make a virtue
of this sad situation with his subjective ideaUsm, but convinced few.
Meanwhile, in spite of this, the exploration of nature proceeded by leaps
and bounds. Yet, consistent with the collapse of the Cartesian project,
it did this under the guidance of an assumption—the universality and
necessity of the causal order—^which remained ever and always a mere
assumption, a conjecture it could never justify or validate. Furthermore,
this assumption carried with it a consequence which some, at least,
especially those still committed to the original Cartesian project, found
intolerable: the naturalization of the human subject, "man," as he was
called, his reduction to the status of an isolated and peculiar effect of the
vast causal order. This was intolerable because it seemed to rob "man"
of his freedom and dignity.
I have spent some time on these familiar developments in early
modern philosophy because I believe that they constitute the situation,
the problem to which Husserl was responding with his treatment of the
concept of intentionality. You may object that this situation, this critical
moment of malaise and ambiguity, was aheady faced by Kant and that