Seeing What Is Not There

Santayana said, "Nothing given exists." One thinks of jokes right away. A Volkswagen is given you as a commencement gift. Nothing given exists. Therefore, qua given, your car is nonexistent, and you can say thanks for nothing to the giver. But, as some philosophers still remind us, ordinary terms may be used in an extraordinary way or in prescribed applications in the treatment of philosophical problems. "Given" here is subject to such use, and we must understand it that way if we are doing philosophy. In this particular essay, I am wholly in favor of doing just that, since I think the result, arrived at my way, will put the concept of "intentional object" in a new light, especially as applied to objects of visual perception. My essay is to be a speculative improvisation on the ambiguous notion of the "myth of the givenv-the notion that no such thing exists-conceding something to it, but in a way that pulls the rug out from under those who currently maintain it. How, then, is Santayana's statement to be construed, playing his language-game? What is this "given" that, by nature, is nonexistent? In visual experience, it is a (determinate) universal, an essence, simple or conlplex, and universals, as such, subsist only. They do not exist. There are givens, but to be does not entail to exist. When the material conditions are right, a universal ("essence") supervenes in the field of visual consciousness, is immediately "intuited," and taken (or mistaken) as a sign of a state of affairs among existing particulars. Thus what is given in the field of your visual perception of, say, the woman you love, is a wraith-a Iovely apparition of the existing particular female you take it to characterize. It is nevertheless a bona fide object of visual "intuition," though nonexistent. And you may have fallen in love withjust that-as will dawn on you when you find out that your dream woman is not the one with the m-predicates: the one that exists and you live and sleep with. After aI1, "love" is, in our more recent lingo, an intentional verb. You can love what does not exist. Santayana said, in effect, that "see" is an intentional verb. But he was more than underwriting the weak notion that sonzetin?es what one sees is not really there (existent). His point was that