ABSTRACT

The last lecture was devoted to the region of subjectivity, of personal intentionality. This region was a region of higher-order phenomena which were either of bodily phenomena directly, or after a certain number of removes. There might be an appearance of a body, slanted and illustrated in a certain manner, and there might be a recognition of this appearance and its characters, and perhaps even a recognition of this recognition. Everywhere in the realm of mind there is an open possibility of what Husserl calls Einschachtelung the emboîtement or encapsulation of simpler references in more complex ones. Thus there can be recollections of recollections, reflections upon reflections, conceptions of conceptions, modellings of modellings, symbolizations of symbolizations, imaginings of imaginings and so on, and there may also be the mixed cases of Einschachtelung as where we recall a per-ception, refer symbolically to an imagination, etc. A vast symbolism, with many primitive ideas and axioms, would be required to do justice to this intentional ‘logic’, but, as it would be open to much controversy, and would involve probabilistic rather than rigorous theorems, it will perhaps never be carried far by the symbolists. There is so much utterly trivial material that can be treated with so much rigour, that it is doubtful whether anything so important and so non-rigorous as the mind and its acts will ever receive full symbolic attention. It is also doubtful whether, with all the difficulties of introspection, many will recognize that at least the first few levels of such higher-order phenomena represent possibilities that can be observably instantiated, that are in fact of quite frequent occurrence.