"The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy."

— Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938)


Date
1911
Metaphor
"The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy."
Metaphor in Context
[…] We soon see that the relationships in the sphere of the psychical are totally different from those in the physical sphere. The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy. Psychical being, being as "phenomenon," is in principle not a unity that could be experienced in several separate perceptions as individually identical, not even in perceptions of the same subject. In the psychical sphere there is, in other words, no distinction between appearance and being, and if nature is a being that appears in appearance, still appearances themselves (which the psychologist certainly looks upon as psychical) do not constitute a being which itself appears by means of appearances lying behind it--as every reflection on the perception of any appearance whatever makes evident. It is then clear: there is, properly speaking, only one nature, the one that appears in the appearance of things. Everything that in the broadest sense of psychology we call a psychical phenomenon, when looked at it and for itself, is precisely phenomenon and not nature.
(179)
Provenance
Reading
Citation
First published in Logos. See "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," trans. Quentin Lauer, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71-147.
Theme
Meta-metaphorical
Date of Entry
08/14/2013

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.