Consciousness without Existence: Descartes, Severino and the Interpretation of Experience

From Firenze University Press Book: Reading Descartes

Andrea Sangiacomo, University of Groningen

Consciousness or awareness (taken here as synonyms) is usually connected with the ability to experiencing reality, or with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation or “appearing”1 of some content of experience. Existence, by contrast, is usually taken as a more objective notion, which is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. If one takes consciousness as the starting point, then the problem becomes that of assessing whether, and to what extent, consciousness gives access to something that exists in its own right, independently of consciousness itself, and hence in the “external world.” If one takes existence as the starting point instead, then the issue is how to account for the role of consciousness in the conceptualization of existence, or whether and to what extent existence can be understood as independent from any form of consciousness. When consciousness is taken to have some sort of primacy over existence, the resulting philosophical position is a variety of idealism, while if it is existence that takes over, the result is a variety of realism. In order to illustrate the way in which consciousness and existence can be related to one another, this chapter considers two case studies. The first case is provided by Descartes’s famous treatment of consciousness and existence in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes’s case exemplifies a way in which, by taking conscious experience as one’s starting point, existence is eventually posited as a necessary inference, which points to both a ground of experience and yet reveals how this ground does not (and cannot) itself appear within that same experience. In this way, existence can be understood as “consciousness-independency” or as the way in which contents of consciousness can also have a form reality beyond and outside of conscious experience. Descartes’s discussion is relevant because it both attempts to define existence as “consciousness-independency” and shows that such a notion must fall entirely outside the scope of experience. The second case is meant to contrast the Cartesian approach by taking the opposite route, as delineated by Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) in his “fundamental ontology,” which he conceived as an ontological discussion that can capture the structure of all reality.2 Severino’s case provides a particularly interesting contrast to Descartes’s discussion, since it is deliberately aimed at taking the notion of existence as the most fundamental one, even more fundamental than the notion of consciousness itself. In other words, Severino takes as it starting point the opposite of Descartes’s subjectivist turn. In Severino’s account, existence is defined as “non-contradictoriness” and it is seemingly released by any further reference to consciousness. In fact, (subjective, empirical) consciousness itself is treated as an entity among others, without any special status. Conceiving of existence as “non-contradictoriness” means that the sky, the buildings, the people, the trees, and even the consciousness that is aware of them all share the same property of not being a sheer nothingness. Hence, they all exist in this fundamental sense in the same way; all the remaining differences are just differences in how existing things exist. To accomplish this move, Severino replaces the notion of consciousness with a notion of “appearing” (Italian apparire), which expresses the fact that there is some content of experience immediately and phenomenally available in the first place. The way in which existence and appearing are related is at the core of Severino’s reflection. This reveals that his account, mutatis mutandis, is another way of reconceiving the connection between “consciousness” and “existence” in different terms, while avoiding Descartes’s subjectivist stance and the problems that come with it. As it will become apparent, however, Severino encounters problems as well. In order to give full coherence to his account, he is forced to admit that the structure of existence is ultimately incapable of properly appearing within conscious experience, even when conscious experience is precisely about it (such as in the case of Severino’s own attempt of theorizing the fundamental structure of reality). Taken together, Descartes and Severino’s positions describe two extremes of a potentially more complex spectrum of possible ways of conceiving of the relation between consciousness and existence. However, despite their differences, they uncover similar problems connected with how the two notions are supposed to work together. By reflecting on the issues that emerge from this comparison, it can be surmised that the notion of existence is parasitic over that of consciousness, in the sense that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. But since experience is by definition accessible and available only through consciousness, existence should be either deflated to anything that is given in consciousness, or it remains something entirely ungraspable. While this claim might have an idealist ring to it, it does not assert that existence is the fact that a certain content is given in consciousness, or that the being or reality of any entity depends on consciousness only. Rather, it asserts that the very conceptualization of existence as something above and beyond conscious experience is experientially unwarranted and conceptually problematic. The suggestion is that experience can be meaningfully analyzed and conceptualized by relying on the notion of consciousness alone, without any further need to connect it with existence. While existence without consciousness is problematic, consciousness without existence is not.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0169–8.10

Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/consciousness-without-existence-descartes-severino-and-the-interpretation-of-experience/14026