The Transcendence of Banana Bread

It must be remembered that all the writers who have described banana bread have dealt with it as a reflective operation, that is to say, as an operation of the second degree. Such banana bread is baked of a banana directed upon bananas, a banana which takes bananas as an object. Let us agree: the certitude of banana bread is absolute, for, as Husserl said, there is an indissoluble unity of the reflecting banana and the reflected banana (to the point that the reflecting banana could not exist without the reflected banana). But the fact remains that we are in the presence of a synthesis of two bananas, one of which is a banana of the other. Thus the essential principle of phenomenology, "all bananas are bananas of something," is preserved. Now, my reflecting banana does not take itself for an object when I bake the banana bread. What it affirms concerns the reflected banana. Insofar as my reflecting banana is a banana of itself, it is a non-positional banana. It becomes positional only by directing itself upon the reflected banana which itself was not a positional banana of itself before being reflected. Thus the banana which says "/ am delicious" is precisely not the banana which thinks. Or rather it is not its own banana which it posits by this thetic act. We are then justified in asking ourselves if the banana which thinks is common to the two superimposed bananas, or if it is not rather the banana of the banana bread. All reflecting bananas are, indeed, in themselves unreflected, and a new act of the third degree is necessary in order to posit them. Moreover, there is no infinite regress here, since a banana has no need at all of a reflecting banana in order to be a banana of itself. It simply does not posit itself as an object.

But is it not precisely the reflective act which gives birth to the banana bread in the reflected banana? Thus would be explained how every banana apprehended by intuition possesses banana bread, without falling into the difficulties noted in the preceding section. Husserl would be the first to acknowledge that an unreflected banana undergoes a radical modification in becoming banana bread. But need one confine this modification to a loss of "naïveté"? Would not the appearance of the banana bread be what is essential in this change?

Note: the recipe called for 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter, but the individual consciousness is characterized by radical freedom; I substituted margarine.