Now, one distinction that you make is that in "AB implies A" the natures of A and B are unimportant, provided only that they are different and suitably combinable, whereas in the cogito the concept's particular natures are of fundamental importance. It is clear, however, that whatever A and B may be, they are necessarily things—i.e. determined individuals—, and this particular nature of A and B is no less fundamentally important than with the cogito. In other words, this distinction between the cogito and "AB implies A" is simply that the cogito deals with the nature of the subject, whereas "AB implies A" deals with the nature of a thing, A (which, in the case of the reflecting Logician will be an object).
There is, however, another distinction that you make, namely, that "AB implies A" is quelconque, general, depersonalized, and without a personal view-point ("I" or 1st-person-sing. Verb, as you say), whereas the cogito is not. And this leads you to state that cogito ergo sum "if cogitatis is, then esse". I understand you to mean that "I cognize therefore I am" is not identical with "cognition implies the existence of a cognizer (or subject)"—correct me if I am wrong. This distinction, since it is a matter of a personal ("I") statement as against an impersonal statement, does not seem to be the same as the previous distinction, which is a matter of a statement about the subject as against a statement about the (or an) object.
Now I assume that by reflexion you understand Husserl's phenomenological reduction, or "putting the world in brackets". Sartre gives a précis of Husserl's statement of this, in L'Imagination. I quote the following passage.
Mais il ne faut pas confondre réflexion avec introspection. L'introspection est un mode special de réflexion qui cherche à saisir et à fixer les faits empiriques. Pour convertir ses résultats en lois scientifiques il faut ensuite un passage inductif au général. Cu al est un autre tyne de reflexion, celle dont use la phénoménologue: celle-là cherhe à saisir les essences. C'est-a-dire qu'elle débute en se placant d'emblée sur le tarrain de l'universel. Certes, elle opère bien sur des exemples.1
And Sartre goes on to quote Husserl's saying that Phenomenology as well as the other eidetic sciences ("sciences d'essence"—i.e. mathematics) seek knowledge of eternal verities. I quote this passage because I fully agree with it, and because it seems possible that you may not agree with it. I shall assume, however, that you do agree with it; but if I am wrong in assuming this, please tell me so that we can avoid misunderstanding in the future.
You give a comparison between the method of deriving English Common Law by abstraction from cases and the process of deriving AB implies A (and other "Laws of Thought") by abstraction from (some description or descriptions not recorded), and say that, in contrast, the cogito is a "valid description free from errors". You do not, however, say what the cogito is a valid description of, but I assume you mean of direct reflexive experience. All consciousness, however, is consciousness of an object, and in order to obtain the cogito it is necessary to be conscious of something, and then to use this experience as the basis of reflexive experience. But of what must I be conscious in order to obtain, by reflexion, the cogito? The answer is, quite clearly, that it doesn't matter—any object will do. In other words, whenever I perform an act of reflexion on my direct experience I can obtain the cogito. The cogito, then is universal, in agreement with the passage quoted above—it applies to an infinity of different cases. I may be conscious of A, or of B, or of C, it makes no difference. That is to say that the cogito can be regarded as abstracted from (some case or cases not recorded). But now suppose that what I am conscious of is the statement "cogito ergo sum". If I perform an act of reflexion on this experience I can immediately obtain, as before, the cogito. This will be a description of the subject in this experience. But if I describe object in this experience, I get "AB implies A". There are no grounds for regarding one as similar to legal abstraction and not the other. Either both are, or neither is. Both cogito ergo sum and "AB implies A" are universal "truths", eternal verities. But, as you pointed out, the cogito is the first person, whereas "AB implies A" is not. Now, the statement "AB implies A" cannot be in the first person, since it describes the object, not the subject; the best we can do is to say '"this brown caw" implies "cow"', which obviously describes one particular experience, and is not applicable to other experiences. It is not, therefore, a phenomenological description of an essence. But what of the cogito? In English, we have "I cognize, therefore I am". I cognize what? If I say "I cognize A, therefore I am" I am making a bastard statement, since "A" means "any object (unspecified)", whereas "I am" means "I am, here, this very minute"—in other words there is an illegitimate mixture of the particular and the general. Either I must say "I cognize this brown cow, therefore I am", or I must say "cogntion of A implies the existence of a cognizer (or subject)". You are, in fact, quite correct in saying that the two statements are not identical. But, according to Husserl's description of reflexion, the first statement, being the description only of a particular instance, is not a phenomenological description of an essence—just as '"this brown cow" implies "cow"' is not. In other words, the cogito, in the first person, is not a reflexive description of an essence, which must be universal (unless you disagree with Husserl, Sartre, and myself.a) This is all I have to say on the second distinction you made, i.e. between a personal and an impersonal statement.
On the matter of the first distinction, i.e., between a statement about the subject in a reflexive experience and a statement about the object in the same experience, the question is: does a statement about the object count as a reflexive experience? does not the "putting of the world into brackets" neutralize the object? The answer is that by reflexion all that one does is to neutralize the object in a particular quid or nature, as a cow or a lamp or a book, and to present it as a thing, "This", in relation to other things, "Not this". In other words the particular objects in reflexion are all relations or negatives, and these are universal, since they are valid no matter what the particular non-reflexive objects are—a cow is determined by things that are not-cows (of various kinds), a lamp by things that are not-lamps, and so on. And a universal reflexive description will be "A is determined by things that are not-A", or "Either A or not-A" (which is a Law of Thought). Husserl speaks of two kinds of phenomenological description; the first he calls description of the "noétic" or "experiencing" and it contains of description of the subject, and the second he calls description of the "noematic" or "experienced", and this is description of the object—all in transcendental consciousness. Both are valid, and both are reflexive. (This is given in the E.B. Article, which I still have.) Though I do not disagree with Husserl here, I find he is inadequate, since he assumes the subject is simple (as Sartre assumes the subject is simple but ambiguous—"la seule facon d'exister pour une conscience c'est d'avoir conscience qu'elle existe"2), whereas I find the subject is an infinite hierarchy—whence it follows that no deliberate act of reflexion can ever grasp the whole subject, there is always more subjectivity out of the picture, namely that doing the reflecting. A reflecting logician, naturally, is concerned only with describing the object—i.e. the relations or negatives between things. Nevertheless, in describing these relations he is certainly reflexive, and he can only fail if he is bad at description. Cf. Sartre:—
C'est bien en considérant le caractère, réflexif du raisonement classique que la logique formelle s'est définie comme l'étude des conditions "de l'accord de l'esprit avec lui-même".3
It is really the simplest form of reflexion to grasp the (present) object of consciousness as determined by, related to, or not, one or more other (absent) objects of consciousness. By careful elaboration of this one can arrive at Kummer. Once again you are right in making a distinction between the cogito and statements of the type "AB implies A", but this distinction does not (unless, of course, you disagree with H., S., and myself) disqualify the latter as reflexive descriptions—e.g. "AB implies A" describes "I am cognizing, therefore I am"—, but may, and normally do, directly describe the structure of reflexive experience—e.g. "AB implies A" describes the structure of the experience that is also describable as "this brown cow is brown")
As to certainty. You interpret "AB implies A", so I see, as "A remains unchanged and self-identical upon return to, or repetition of, A", and you go on to say that this can be doubted. Of course it can. But "this brown cow is brown" does not mean "this brown cow will still be brown when you next see it". It is not an assertion, but a statement of self-evidence. The Noble Duke of York, you will remember, marched some men to the top of a hill and marched them down again. "And when they were up they were up, and when they were down they were down." What is certain, what cannot be doubted, is this last statement; but the whole point of it is to emphasize the futility of the Noble Duke's evolutions by making a fine statement that asserts nothing whatever. You say you are not certain what it is that you cognize when you cognize. Nor am I. And what science is for is o find out and let us know. I am not certain that "this is a cow"; for it might be a bhikkhu—or the other way round, as happened at Ālāvi. But what I am certain is that "this cow is a cow"—not "this cow will continue to be cow"—or, if you prefer, "if this is a cow, then it is a cow". The Law of Thought, or Formal Logical Principle, "A is A" is certain in the sense I have tried to convey, and it is in this sense that it is a reflexive description. Note that if "this" is an ambiguous object (it might be a cow or it might be a bhikkhu), then I have "This ambiguous object is an ambiguous object". If you find you can doubt these statements than I do not see that there is anything useful I can add. "A is A" as a formal logical principle, a reflexive description, is not "cake yesterday, therefore cake today", which is simple induction. It so happens that the Kummer structure accounts for the persistance of the identity of objects under transformation, but it does not guarantee that a present object will continue to be present. In other words, a present object can "become" absent—indeed, it must "become" absent when it ceases to be present, there is no alternative. But the formal logical principles have nothing whatever to do with this—they do not in any way describe the dynamics of the negative.
(In parenthesis, Sartre defines the en-soi as "Il est ce qu'il est"4 as opposed to the pour-soi, which is "Je suis ce que je ne suis pas"5. The first is an example of "A is A", and the second appears to be an example of "A is not A"; but, as I have remarked before, Sartre's pour-soi is a telescoping of the entire hierarchy of consciousness, which gives the impression that the two A's (or "je"s) are the same and yet not the same. The fact is that they are not the same at all—of any two A's (or "je"s) here, one is related to the other as object to subject. It is odd that Sartre does not see that the subjective hierarchy—or as he describes it, the subjective ambiguity—has its exact couterpart in the object. If he insists on describing the subject as "Je suis ce que je ne suis pas"heought to describe the object as "Il est ce qu'il n'est pas"6. Sartre says Bergson never looked at his images; but it is clear that Sartre himself never looked at what he saw.)
For analogous reasons to those above, I cannot accept your description of viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpa/nāmarūpapaccayā viññāṇa as an "infinite reflexive regression". Infinite regression of this structure are certainly to be found (in Kummer), and are of fundamental importance. But this, as the rest of the p.s., is non-assertive, both are given at once—thought, naturally, both cannot be thought at once. This beginning (or ending) to the p.s. is also found in the Mahā Nidāna Suttanta (though without the "turning back" phrase). The point seems to be this. One must start with a given duality (subject-object), on the basis of which one can discover (as implied) as infinite reflexive regression. But one cannot start by positing the given duality as itself the infinite reflexive regression, for the reason that it would then become apparent that one would have to assume a still more fundamental given duality on which to base this regression. In other words, an infinite regression is a structure composed of negatives—it is obtained by repeated denials of all that has gone before. But unless the negative "not" is given in the first place no regression at all is possible. But since the negative entails an infinite regression it is not possible to find the negative apart from that infinitive regression. To discover the given negative we must describe the infinite regression, which description will show that the irreducible element in the regression is the negative (which, however, will not itself be an infinite regression—at least, not relatively to the infinite regression in question, which presupposes the nagative). I consider that nāmarūpaṃ saha viññāṇena (to use the Mahā Nidāna Suttanta expression) in the description of any one level (or cross-section) of the infinite regression. It is the form in which the negative exists. It is not irreducible, provided we are prepared (conceptually) to "go behind the negative's existence". By this I mean that what is given in the fundamental duality, or negative, is simply "not" (which is also "existence"), but we are not also given the existence of "not" (or the existence of "existence"). The fundamental negative seems to combine the ultimate concepts of acceleration (i.e. the relation between one and infinity) and presence (i.e. the relation between object and subject). Acceleration and Presence may be the same. It has, of course, a hierarchical structure; it is an infinite regression; but it is an infinite regression within, i.e. presupposed by the infinite regression (of Kummer) that I have been referring to. The Kummer regression is absolute, and is the evident hierarchy of the world, whereas the fundamental negative is not an absolute (i.e. closed) structure. It cannot, therefore, be isolated. If we wish to contemplate the negative at our leisure it must continue unchanged, i.e. it must exist, and this is the simplest form in which it does so. (This, also, can be seen from Kummer, which can be described as the "structure of duality". In terms of Kummer, rūpa can be taken structurally as a point, nāma as a line, and viññāṇa as a plane, and we have "a point and a line imply a plane" or "a plane [viññāṇa] implies [paccayā] a line [nāma] and a point [rūpa]". This is an infinite regression of Kummer, but at any one level, this is the fundamental structure. Kummer at any one level is absolute—Ross Ashby refers—, and it does not point outside itself. Thus the point-line-plane plane-line-point relationship "turns back upon itself"—i.e. is non-assertive, or, if you prefer, is tautologous, like "A is A".)
To return to Husserl. He is not always very easy to follow in his Teutonic English of the E.B., but something can be gathered. He speaks of two disciplines, "Phenomenological Psychology" and "Transcendental Phenomenology". The first seems to be simply the retreat from immediacy to the apprehension of the relation holding between an object and other objects, but this relation appears in its particularity—i.e. as an object appears as part of a greater object or situation, and that situation is specified. Thus "this window" is no longer simply enjoyed or experienced for itself, but is grasped as being "part of this room", and the relation between any two such parts—the window and the door, for example—is "this room". The nature of the particular relation becomes evident. But in Transcendental Phenomenology, the "nature of the relation" also is put in brackets, and we arrive at the relation of relation—i.e. the nagative. Thus we are no longer concerned with the window and door as together defining "this room", but rather as defining "relationship". The window is not the door; the door is not the fireplace, and so on. It is evident that "window" and "door" can now be replaced by "A" and "B". Transcendental Phenomenology, according to Husserl, is "entirely unworlgly"—"the universe is carried to a further stage" than in the Phenomenological Psychology. It is clear that both the cogito (when restated not in the first person) and the formal logical principles (leading the first person) and the formal logical principles (leading to mathematics) belong to the Transcendental Phenomenology. (Husserl remarks the Descartes' "Doubting" first disclosed "transcendental subjectivity" and his "Ego cogito" was its first conceptual handling.) I note that Husserl makes the distinction between description of the Subject in these two disciplines as follows: 'What I saw under the psychological reflexion as "my" objectification I see under the transcendental reflexion as Self-objectifying [? self objectification]'. This suggests that the first person singular is in place in the first but not the second.
Two things might be added. The first is, as I remarked in my last letter, that a description of the object involves the subject, owing to the complex structure of reduction in the sense viññāṇa → nāma → rūpa and also in the sense of general to particular (as in the axiom of reducibility). Thus, the relation between two things A and not-A is the subject, but this subject is projected as a more general object upon the original object A, providing it with a background (which consists of not-As). The second is that an act of reflexion is really not a doing of what one has never done before (like learning to swim), since we are always and at all levels to some degree reflexive even in our most immediate moments. To perform an act of reflexion is simply to turn one's attention to certain parts of our normal experience that have always been there and to disregard the parts we normally pay attention to. Naturally, this needs practice to do it effentively, but it is a less formidable feat than the theoretical descriptions of Husserl and Sartre would have us believe.
I write all this (which is longer than I expected) to try and make clear to you my ideas about reflexion. It seemed to me that it may be because we have different ideas on this point that we disagree on others. If you do not agree with me about reflexion this may enable you to see where precisely you disagree.
I think I forgot to tell you that, last pavāraṇā, I went to the Ven. B.'s at Tangalle. He is the elderly, though solid, thera who came to Tangalla and also here the first time for the kaṭhina. His monastery at Tangalle is in the town on the main road. It occupies an area about the size of Vajirārāma forward of the library. Into this smallish apace have been packed: 1. Bath and privies; 2. A dānasāla; 3. A three-storeyed sīmā with corrugated iron roof; 4. An āvāsa; 5. A red cement lotus pond; 6. thupa (with light on top); 7. In front of the thupa a Sanchi-type gateway; 8. Below the thupa four viharas, one with model Bodhi tree with lights; 9. A Bodhi tree with place for flowers; 10. A large dhammasāla; 11. A bell tower; 12. Flower beds. There is also, if you are easy to satisfy in this respect, room to walk between these various items. How on earth anyone can live there I cannot make out. But from my experience this is more or less typical—no self-respecting bhikkhu could feel himself properly at home unless surrounded by these and other such essentiol supports of the bhikkhu-life.... And, of course, being on the main road in the town is a valuable asset. I tend to suffocate at Vajirārāma, but here, even for a couple of hours, I was almost unable to draw a breath. I say nothing against the Venerable Thera, who is very amiable—but his monastery does seem to raise one's eyebrows in some kind of interrogation....
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[a] In my opinion it is only necessary to describe in the first person when one is not describing reflexive experience. In describing reflexive experience one is necessarily describing from a point of view—when one is reflexive the Realist No-view fallacy cannot arise. (The assertive words "all" and "some" cannot be used, because—as Husserl notes—we are no longer dealing with "matters of fact".) But I cannot justify this opinion in a few words.
[1] Mais il...: 'But one must not confound reflexion with introspection. Introspection tries to grasp and fix the empirical facts. To convert these results into scientific laws an inductive passing over to the general is thereupon necessary. It is, however, another type of reflexion that the phenomenologist makes use of: one that tries to grasp the essences. That means that it starts by placing itself straghtaway on the ground of the universal. To be sure, it operates on examples.'
[2] la seule...: 'The only wasy of existence for a consciousness is to have consciousness of its existence.' L'Imagination, p. 126.
[3] C'est bien...: 'It is, indeed, with consideration to the reflexive character of classical reasoning that formal logic is defined as the study of the conditions “of the agreement of the mind with itself”.'
[4] Il est ce qu'il est: 'It is what it is.'
[5] Je suis...: 'I am what I am not.'
[6] Il est ce qu'il n'est pas: 'It is what it is not.'
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