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The Dynamic Self

The thesis

Since Descartes and Locke people were thought of as essentially minds - in a sense of 'mind' that is more or less recognisable today: I have tried to explain what this belief amounted to.

Minds were associated with bodies, and it was possible to think that minds were material, an aspect of bodies, as in Hobbes. It was also possible to think that there were only minds, as in Berkeley. Either way, people were thought of as minds.

(The relevant chapter in the book by Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul, bears the title The Self as Mind).

Human beings continued to be thought of as minds thereafter: but certain key transformations took place.

The first shift took place around the beginning of the 19th Century: the mind began to be thought of as made up of thought processes.

Then, in the twentieth century, thought processes came to be thought of as information-flows in the brain.

So there were two key transformations subsequent to the early Modern revolution. This revolution established the person as the mind. Subsequently, there was a transformation in what the mind was considered to be; and subsequent to that there was a transformation in what thoughts were considered to be.

More detail

The advent of what I am calling a dynamic conception of mind is clearly registered in the writings of Schopenhauer.

Mind for Schopenhauer is essentially what he calls a 'will', drawing on and thinking he can coherently adapt the Kantian 'noumenal self' for this purpose. (The individual 'will' he supposes can be thought of as part of something he calls the 'universal will', but that perhaps need not detain us.) Schopenhauer wants us to understand the individual 'will' not as a 'structural feature' but as an activity. The 'will' is, he says, "an endless striving". (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation p. 164.)

In explaining the contrast he sees between his conception of the mind and the conception he was intending to replace Schopenhauer explicitly draws an analogy between his new idea of the mind (for him, the 'will') and the understanding of the organism that was taking shape as he wrote. This is a crucial parallel. The new - early 19th Century - thinking about the animal was a major locus for what Foucault calls 'the irruption of time'. It is a particularly clear example of the shift I am trying to articulate. Excuse me as I set out the detail carefully.

At the end of the 18th Century a new understanding was developing of what underlay the gross structures, replacing the 18th Century notion of a congeries of particles moving about under the influence of a limited number of "forces".

The new understanding grows out of the application of chemical analysis to substances found in or produced by animals and plants. Chemical analysis showed what a substance was made up of, and revealed the proportions of the various components identified. It relied, as far as animal and plant substances were concerned, to begin with on destructive distillation - heating the stuff to the point of burning it and collecting the various products; and then on what was in essence still burning, but burning in a way that permitted close control. The stuff to be analysed was heated with what is known as an oxidizing agent. (Burning is a fast sort of oxidation.) Once again, the products of the oxidation process were collected and weighed.

The use of oxidizing agents, developed to begin with by Lavoisier, revolutionized the accuracy of analysis. Better and better agents were identified, until by the 1830s analysis had been refined into a standard laboratory technique that was reliable and accurate.

In the first decade of the 19th Century therefore you have more and more substances found in living things being subjected to analysis: and the picture begins to emerge, first, of the living thing as producing a range of (now) organic substances, and then as tantamount to chemical laboratories themselves. The living thing came to be seen as a configuration of chemicals which had been produced by the body.

Beyond that, there arose the question of what happened to the chemicals once synthesized, a question that was answered with the thought that they must enter into chemical interactions with their neighbours. So the body becomes thought of not simply as a syntheses and storehouse of chemicals, but as a configuration of chemical processes - and as simply a configuration of chemical processes. That was what an organic body was: that was what life was.

Before the focus had been on structure - the preoccupation of the 18th Century, and one which drew attention to plants in preference to animals. Now the idea of a set of static structures was seen to be illusory, or at least superficial. There were bits of static structure - bark, for example - but those bits were dead. Wherever there was life there was a dynamic process, a network of ongoing chemical processes which produced the appearance of persistent structure at the level of gross observation.

At the time Schopenhauer was writing his The World as Will and Representation, - published in 1819 - thinking in physiology was still moving towards this conclusion. There were still those who considered that the key day-to-day chemical changes going on inside the organism served to convert food into materials required to replace the organism's structure damaged through wear and tear.

Others, however, argued that the chemical processes going on within the animal were of much deeper significance - their role was not simply that of repairing worn or damaged structures. It was instead those processes, operating at the micro-level, which at the level of ordinary observation generated the very sense of there being enduring 'structures' at all - in the way that had been believed by physiologists hitherto.

The outcome of that line of thought was the conception of the organism as in fact nothing but a complexly interacting set of chemical reactions.

Schopenhauer acknowledges this shift in physiological thinking, and applies it to the mind or 'will'. The 'will', he says, must be understood as constant activity - 'endless flux', 'eternal becoming':

"... [T]he constant renewal of the matter of every organism can ... be regarded as the mere phenomenon of ... continual pressure and change, and physiologists are now ceasing to regard such renewal as the necessary reparation of the substance consumed in movement. The possible wearing out of the machine cannot in any way be equivalent to the constant inflow through nourishment. Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will." Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, first published as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1819, Dover edition translated from the German by E.F.J.Payne, New York, 1966, Dover, p. 164.

I think there is a danger of exagerating the metaphysical import of the shift in physiological thinking that Schopenhauer is picking up on here - a danger which perhaps sweeps Schopenhauer himself away. As it is put forward by physiologists, the thesis that a 'structure' like an animal liver or heart is to be understood dynamically has no tendency to replace the notion of a material 'thing' with the notion of a 'process'. In saying that a liver is an ongoing complex of chemical reactions the physiologist is not saying that we should dispense in general with the notion of a thing and replace it with 'process' or 'complex of processes'. At least, the physiologist cannot be understood in that way at the beginning of the 19th Century. Chemical changes at that time were conceived of as interactions between small particles - atoms and molecules - and a particle was conceived of as an enduring physical thing. So what was being proposed was not that the notion of a thing could be replaced but that what we ordinarily think of as things were correctly to be thought of as the appearance generated by changes in relations between much smaller things!

Does this even imply that what we ordinarily observe - the liver - is not really a thing at all?

This would be like saying a waterfall is not a thing, on the grounds that it is the appearance generated by the coming and going of much smaller things, particles of water.

I think the answer here is, it doesn't matter what we say so long as we are clear about what is really happening. You can deny that a waterfall is a thing if you want to, but it's a bit of a party trick. There is a sense in which it is a thing, and a sense in which it isn't.

But also - this is not a complete account. There is the question: what makes such and such a congeries of processes a thing, when there are other congeries of processes which are not things? (This I think is Leibniz's issue of 'unity': and he felt the necessity to invoke the Scholastic notion of form to resolve it.) Perhaps however I can leave this question on one side - when what I am trying to argue is that whatever a thing is, you are using the concept whether you say the liver is a big thing or that it is simply a congeries of changes amongst small things.

Later in the 19th Century there are radical changes in how people thought of atoms and molecules - the idea of them as small pieces of continuous 'matter' was surrendered. But that need not come into the present discussion.

I am trying to articulate changes in conceptions of the mind in the early part of the 19th Century, and I am saying that Schopenhauer strikes his illuminating parallel with shifts in the understanding of parts of animals that were underway at that time. I am adding to that the claim that that shift in physiological had nothing to do with the abandonment of 'thing' in favour of 'process', if the suggestion is that the concept of 'process' does not involve the concept of 'thing'.

Pre-Draft

___________________

How can I defend the idea that the mind at the end of the 18th Century became thought of as a set of processes?

First I point to the parallel transformation in thinking about the body.

This is uncomfortably out of period but expresses the key point well. I want to say this picture emerged in the first decades of the 19th Century:

"All constiituents of living matter, whether functional or structural, of simple or complex constiution, are in a state of rapid flux. (Rudolf Schoenheimer, The Dynamic State of Body Constituents, Cambridge, Mass, Hardvard, 1942.; quoted by David Wiggins in his Sameness and Substance, Oxford, 1080, Blackwell, p.46.)

And then I appeal to changes in other conceptions.

The huge wave of institution-building around 1800 involved the deployment of a new type of artifact, as well as bricks and mortar. If one takes the idea of a business for example: in the 18th Century a business was a named set of individuals carrying on some profitable or not so profitable activity. In the 19th Century it became something altogether abstract. The individuals carrying out the activities became defined into irrelevance. The business became an abstracted set of activities only. Individuals - workers, management, shareholders, could come and go: the successful business went on unaffected.

People were put behind locked doors prior to the vast prison building programme of the eighteenhundreds, and an individual could be put in the lock-up. But the new institution of imprisonment made it possible for you to be sent to prison. The new abstraction was not a particular place, a particular building, with particular people in charge. It consisted rather in of a set of activities which could be carried out by anybody belonging to the appropriate class of functionaries.

It became possible to move a prison, and not by shifting the actual stones by which its instantiation hitherto had been achieved.

I also point to changes registered in the philosophy published in the 19th Century.

The immediate heirs of Kant - heirs inasmuch as they chose as their starting point various of his ideas - shared the new conception of mentality - mentality as sets of mental processes. "Thoughts are self-moving functions" declares Hegel. ( Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, 10, Section 33; "Hegel by Hypertext" edition.) The mind "for ever produces itself" (Philosophy of Mind, Wallace Translation, Introduction, Section 385, e-text);

What was Hegel's Geist for example? Not a theatre within which ideas manoeurvred and were manoeuvered, nor the product of quasi-mechanical processors called faculties, but a set of 'potentials' and their partial realization, amounting to the history of a people.

The Geist is in constant process of realisation. And it is this feature which marks it out as processual not structural. It is not that a people has a structure called the Geist somewhere 'inside'. The Geist is what people do! It is the constant flux of actions of individuals (and so of whatever institutions individuals make up) which constitute the development of the people towards its goal.

Fichte

...

Here is the best a modern expositor can make of the self in Schelling:

What Schelling proposes is a vision of the Absolute as One, as a single multi-faceted, self-creating, continuously developing cosmos of which nature is one aspect, the human mind another... " Solomon, Continental Philosophy since 1750, Oxford, OUP 1988, p.54.

From the enveloping fog the notion of the individual self as 'self-creating' and 'continuously developing' emerges rather clearly. No distinction is made between person, mind or self; and what we have here is what I am calling the 'dynamic' conception of the individual's mind.

Schiller

...

The abandonment of the structural conception of the mind is manifest in all the influential writings of the immediate idealist progeny of Kant: Fichte, Schelling, Schiller as well as Hegel and Schopenhauer. But what of those who took Kant's positivist side as central, his insistence that the limits of intelligibility were close, and that the only approach to knowledge we could aspire to, besides some knowledge of its preconditions, was bound to rely on sense experience of the phenomenal world?

We are speaking here of those who drove psychology into a sustainedly empirical outlook, Brentano, Mill, Maine de Biran.

In J.S. Mill the abandonment of the theatre conception is marked by the use of the word 'sensation' for the current content /activity of consciousness in place of Hume's 'ideas' and 'impressions', and Locke's 'ideas'. Material objects for Mill are 'permanent possibilities of sensation' (Examination of SWH's Philosophy) - and he applies the same approach to 'minds'. 'The belief that I entertain that my mind exists, when it is not feeling, nor thinking, nor conscious of its own existence, resolves itself into a belief of a Permanent Possibility of those states.'(Examination, London, 1865, p. 241; quoted in Ryan, The Philsophy of John Sturat Mill, p.99.

And apart from that belief? The mind as we know it is a 'succession of manifold feelings' (Examination, p235; Ryan, p.99.) - "that continued series of feelings which I call my life" Mill (Examination, p214,215; quoted in George Grote's Review of Mill's Examination.

Brentano (1838-1917) speaks of 'acts of consciousness' (Solomon, Continental Philosophy, p. 101)

So does Mill: eg "The facts of internal consciousness; the mind's acts and affections" Examination p.165/6

REVIEW OF THE WORK OF MR JOHN STUART MILL
ENTITLED, 'EXAMINATION OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTONS PHILOSOPHY'
BY GEORGE GROTE
AUTHOR OF
'THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE,'
'PLATO AND THE OTHER COMPANIONS OF SOCRATES,' ETC.
1868
Reprinted from the 'Westminster Review,' January 1, 1866.

JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS

There is an etext of Mill's 'EXAMINATION OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTONS PHILOSOPHY' here

At present we simply observe, that psychology is strikingly distinguished from physiology, in that it derives the materials or objects of its knowledge and inquiries from a source peculiar to itself. Chlat the soul does know itself, and confides in the knowledge thus attained, will be ac. knowledged by every one. The facts are peculiar, differing greatly from, or, as we say, being totally unlike those which we gain by hearing, seeing, and touching. They are very numer. ous, coming and going faster than we can recall or describe them. They are various in their qual&y, differing from each other in important features, as states of perception from states of ~ 4. I

Porter, Noah, 1811-1892. The human intellect: with an introduction upon psychology and the soul. New York 4th Ed 1869 p7

(What is the significance of Mill using the word sensation, or feeling instead of impression and perception? See Mill)

Hume still thinks he can 'look into himself' and perceive a sequence of mental contents. When he does so he reports that he doesn't find any idea corresponding to an enduring self. Hume was saying: the mind cannot be a mental substance extended in time, because we have no experience of such. For Mill there can be no experiencer of the sequence of experience - no experiencer, at any rate, that is extended in time. This is the dynamic conception showing itself. The mind for Mill is mental content, mental content which is forever changing, a flow. The mental content at the momentary present is experienced. But the experiencer is not extended in time. The only anchor in time for the mind is the 'permanent possibility' of experiences not yet present.

Kant

I have said that the immediate idealist heirs of Kant were all working with a dynamic conception of the human mind, and so with a dynamic conception of the human being - since they, even more obviously than others, were committed to the Modern identification of human being with mind.

But what of Kant himself? What conception of the mind did he have? Which side of the watershed (as I am understanding it) did he fall?

One significant difference introduced by Kant was to think of the key mental act not the having of a perception but the making of a judgment. (Making a judgment, Stroud tells us, was asserting a proposition.) Is this the irruption of time in action?

If you begin to think of making judgments as the significant actions of the mind, have you begun to embrace the dynamic conception?

Making a judgement sounds more like an act that does 'having' an idea. But does this matter? Is the mind for Kant a programme of activity rather than a structure?

The impression created by his notion of the mind as analysable into a number of different faculties does nothing to ease in a dynamic view. But it doesn't really confirm it either: faculties can be thought of powers as well as quasi-spatial 'subdivisions'.

Perhaps one can say that the noumenal self at any rate adheres to the dynamic model. It is nothing but willing, a programme of willing - ?

But since we cannot think of it, we had better not.

What of the phenomenal self? Back to the thing that making of judgements. It's in time, so no problem about the momentary present.

A great difficulty with Kant is in knowing what he means when he says the mind, or one of its faculties does this or that.

He often appears to be attempting to contribute to the empirical study of 'how the mind works'. We have a clear version of this project in the programme of John Locke. Locke was thinking about the contents of consciousness and what laws governed the changes that they are subject to. He thought of this project as parallel to the study of the physical world, with his 'ideas' put forward explicitly as analogues of material atoms or corpuscles.

So Kant might be thought of as saying what sequence of 'mental processes' are necessary if the end result is that we 'think' such and such.

Kant distances himself from such a project, so no need to worry more about exactly what it involves. But what then does he think of himself as doing? Strawson says he thinks of his project as delineating the structure of our 'cognitive constitution', on the analogy of studying the structure of our eyes when it comes to the empirical study of sight.(BoS p.16)

But what is our 'cognitive constitution' - the study of which (do I understand him correctly?) Strawson declares to be incoherent?

I need go no farther here than substantiate the claim that it is a structural concept. To think of the mind as, or as involving, a 'cognitive structure' in this way is to think of it structurally. It is to think of the mind as a something that operates upon mental contents - unifying manifolds of presentations, say, or placing intuitions under forms - or making judgements. For example, the understanding, 'awakened into action' by the production of representations, is said by Kant to compare, combine or separate them, so working up 'the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience.' Kant, CPR B1 Kemp-Smith abridged edition, p25)

(It has been pointed out that for Kant judgements take centre stage (eg by ) at the expense of ideas, but Kant still speaks of concepts as objects of possible analysis - eg 'our empirical concept of a body' (Kant, CPR B5 p.27))

For our purposes there is no need to trouble ourselves with any incoherence in such a conception, nor with 'disentangling' all that hangs on it from the 'analytical argument' which may or may not be the lasting legacy of the First Critique. (Strawson, BoS, p.16.) For our purposes it is enough to note that Kant thought of the mind structurally. He belongs to the far side of that watershed that separated the 18th from the 19th Centuries.

Nietzsche

One notable critic of Kant, Nietzsche, thinks of him as maintaining an indefensible understanding of the mind.

What is it, according to Kant, that applies the categories? Nietzsche argues that Kant thinks Kant is saying: a faculty of the mind, and this commits Nietzsche (I say) to the view that Kant's conception was what I am calling 'structural'.

'... Kant asked himself: How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? - and what really did he answer?... "By means of a means (faculty)" - he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that - an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? ...[I]t is high time,' says Nietzsche, 'to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgments necessary?" - in effect, it is high time that we should understand that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves...

Beyond Good and Evil, section 11, Zimmern translation

Nietzsche attributes to Kant then a structural view of the mind; but he is also explicit in arguing for its inadequacy. The 'I' of Kant - sometimes translated 'ego' - Nietzsche thinks has dissolved, and all there is left is thinking.

What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?" He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain"--will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?"

17. With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." One thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," [Hollingdale has 'I' instead of 'ego' throughout. Very helpful!] is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"--even the "one" contains an interpretationI of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula--"To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently - " . . . It was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates--the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined itself).

Beyond Good and Evil, sections 16 and 17, Zimmern translation

[bud]

I have yet to characterise 'structural' adequately.

In the case of the analogue of the organic body, the thesis is that what were thought to be structures are in fact regimes of chemical reactions. The appearance of structure remains. Likewise we expect the mind might still appear as a structure, even though the reality is now thought to be that this appearance is generated by the constant flow of thoughts.

A manifestation of the change however is likely to be a change in the terms in which discussions involving reference to the mind are conducted. References to different departments, or faculties, of the mind will be less frequent, reference to powers of the undifferentiated mind will be more central. Is this what we see?

Boole writes about the laws of thought. Philosophical discussions begin to be seen as falling under the philosophy of mind (Mind starts publication in 18 . Maine de Biran's essay of 1805 was called "Décomposition de la pensée".

For many

Hume thinks there is a sense of identity over time which involves all the parts (or components?) of a thing being numerically the same over time. Where a small bit is knocked off a thing, the thing is strictly not identical with the thing prior to the damage. If this is a correct understanding of 'identity' over time, it is difficult to find anything which stays the same thing over time. To say this however is to assume the ordinary way of thinking about what we take to be objects in the world. But Hume's account of how we come to believe in the enduring existence of obejcts indepednently of us needs somehow to be factored in. His picture seems to be that we have a sequence of perceptions, and that sometimes these impressions are 'the same'. But what for him can be the diffeence between the same perception occurring many times and the occurrence of a plurality of perceptions one after the other?

Something I'm not understanding here.

Can Hume make the distinction I have just articulated?

Return to the question: how to characterise 'structural' in the sense of the mind being conceived of as structural.

It has to be done in terms of identity! The crucial difference is between what it is for A to be the same mind as B in 1780 and what it is for A to be the same mind as B in 1840.

I shall have to arge that diffeent criteria are invoked.

It may be relevant that life after bodily death became interesting in the mid 19th Century - with no worries about the resurrectioin of the body being a desideratum.

(It is also relevant to the twentieth century development that Russell spoke of unsensed sensibilia and Whitehead and others developed the idea that 'process' was prior to 'substance'.)

What then was it for A to be the same mind as B for Locke? A is the same mind as B if A remembers being B.

- for Hume? A is never the same mind as B.

- for Kant? Phenomenal mind A is the same phenomenal mind as B iffthe unity of apperception contrived by A includes B.

- for Coleridge? A is the same substance as B

- Hegel? A is the same mind as B if it has one and the same 'potential'.

- for Mill? A is the same mind as B iff the permanent possibilities of sensation belonging to A are the same as those belonging to B.

- Marx? A is the same mind as B if A is a product of the same body as B

- Dostoievsky? A is the same mind as B iff A and B ....?? Belong to the same body??

- Whitehead?

- Russell?

We can say, ordinarily, A is the same flame as B - eg the fame on the Olympic torch at the beginning and the end of its journey from Athens.

...?

The thing is

... This unfortunately goes nowhere, because the identity of the mind throughout the Modern period is established by the body.

What other approaches are there? The question is: what evidence would be relevant to the claim that there was a shift from structure to process at the turn of the 18th/19th Centuries?

With material things there was science - chemistry was beginning to understand organic reactions. Was anything parallel at work in psychology?

We want to know what was happening in psychology around the 1830s. What we expect is a pursuit of the idea that eg perception was a set of continuous mental processes. The same should be applying to the study of reason, imagination, 'judgment' etc. Was there agreement over what faculties there were? Notice that they began to speak of faculties as powers - I think. Powers are not structural - faculties as quasi-spatial - quasi-suites of offices - were. Maybe this is the thing to clarify - the nature of cogntive faulties in the 18th Century.

Strawson is maybe helpful in bringing out the analogy between cognitive constitution and 'the way the mind works'.

What exactly is a faculty of the mind?

Hume explicitly has a theatre so long as we don't think of it as a building!! But he still has reason, the passions, the understanding - etc?

If the mind is thought of as doing things, quasi-space must be the arena within which that action takes place. In the 19th Century, does the mind do things?

It is certainly looked at by the introspectionist movement. Does this mean it is a quasi-space? Maybe it is in quasi space but a two-dimensional object. You look at it (across quasi-space) but what you see is all surface. - This sounds promising. An object in space has three dimensions. Introspectionism reduces the three-dimensional mind to two dimensions.

Foucault speaks of a third dimension being added in the 19th Century - but that is the other way round. His third dimension is however time.

(Kant speaks of the form of internal perception being time not space. Is this relevant?)

I have tried to make the point that there is a difference between sensation and perception. I can perhaps clarify this by speaking of the quasi-spacial dimension and its absence. Perception must take place in quasi-space; sensation does not. An example of a sensation: the pain I have in my elbow. An example of a perception: the blueness I have 'in front of me'. Even when we are careful to talk about awareness of mental content, for example expressing the point in terms of sense-data, being aware of blueness is structurally different from being aware of a pain. One of the ways in which this comes out is this: we can raise the possibility of the blueness existing unperceived but not the possibility of the pain existing unperceived - ? We are talking about the justification of assimilating all basic experience to quasi-sight.

When you report introspection of a visual experience, do you speak of the experiencing something quai-spatially?? - I am aware of an expanse of blue in front of me?? This would be interesting. 'Introspection' as a term invokes the idea that focussing on the content of one's consciousness is analogous to looking at something.

PH-K says: Are you saying that there has to be a subject for perception but not for sensation? Yes. This is what I am committed to in saying that you can conceive of sensations but not perceptions without a subject.

How can I make this out?

He thinks 'having a blue expanse' is on all fours with 'having a pain in the wisdom tooth'.

But what is this 'having' of a pain? (Russell: being acquainted with a pain?)

PH-K resists the gloss that having = seeing/perceiving because that would lead him into denying naive realism.

But that is a back-minding too far! If he is a naive realist he must recognise every difference between having a pain and seeing something, eg a tree.

I suppose I am trying to talk not to the naive realist but the person who thinks all our knowledge must be a matter of processing the input of sense.

Of course the modern person who holds this doesn't have to hold that the input of sense has to enter into awareness: the processing can all be done without that, we are now happy to think.

But I am thinking of a person who says they are now 'having' an expanse of blue.

May I ask: where is this expanse of blue? Is it in front of you? If s/he says Yes, then when you 'have' an expanse of blue, the exanse of blue is spatially related to you, and you are commiited to there being a subject.

For my contrast it won't be wise to think of having a pain in the wisdom tooth. I had better take as my example: feeeling hot. 'Can we have the window open? I am really hot.'

Where is this 'hot'? Is it in front of you? Surely not. Is it spatially related to you at all? No! QED.

Russell speaks of thoughts or feelings as though there are two sorts of things here. He is dead right.

Blackburn: 'It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensations, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature.' (Dictionary, p.281.)

___

One strand of 19th Century thought about the mind made much of the medieval concept of intentionality. Brentano (1838-1917) maintained that an act of consciousness necessarily 'pointed to' some object other than itself. (In this way he was attempting to offer an alternative to the idealism of Kant and the postKantian idealist tradition.) (Solomon, Continental Philosophy, p.101.

What can we understand about this 'pointing'?

It placed the emphasis on consciousness as active rather than passive. In this crucial respect Brentano is with Kant and the idealists, not Locke. On the theatre model, ideas were 'looked at'. And ideas were themselves mental items. Insistence on 'intentionality' was a way of saying that the object of thoughts were not themselves mental. (This at any rate is according to Solomon.)

Brentano, reverting to preModern ideas, wanted to insist that every 'act of consciousness' had an object. - an 'intentional' object. But perceptions and sensations are different in this respect. You can have a sensation, eg a sinking feeling in the stomach, without that feeling being directed at anything.

Some people say there is a direction - the sensation is 'directed at' the stomach. But if it is so, it is not directed at the stomach in the way in which a belief, say, that my brother is in London, is directed at my brother's being in London.

____________

Introduction

As the 19th Century gets established what you have, in the place of the person as a set of habits, is the person as having a 'self', a self which sometimes gets manifest in what a person says and what a person does and sometimes doesn't.

It is here in Coleridge, writing around 1817:

"...it is among the miseries, and abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and substantial basis for these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without meaning."

Biographia Literaria, 1817, Everyman edition, p.310.

Here Coleridge attempts to make his point by relying on the distinction, inherited from Aristotle via the Scholastics, between qualities and relations on the one hand and substances on the other.

It is not clear to me how this distinction survives into Modernity. It is there in John Locke, but only as something that is undermined by the Modern epistemology he introduced so successfully, which understands knowledge as based on representations derived from sense experience. Take this seriously, says Locke, and you can only think of the qualities/substances distinction as an attempt to distinguish from a thing's properties some mysterious and utterly ineffable bearer of them. You are reaching for the notion of something which at once has properties and doesn't have them, an incoherence. A 'something you know not what', is Locke's wry characterisation. There is nothing more to a thing, under Lockean epistmeology, than its properties, plus the idea that they all 'belong together'

(For further discussion of Locke's handling of 'substance' and a defence of my reading see my presentation on Locke, which is here.)

At the time Coleridge was writing neither psychology nor the science of which psychology claimed paternity recognised 'substances' in the preModern sense in which he was attempting to use the term. 'Substance' by this time, among proponents of science, had to be used with an indefinite article: a substance was a stuff - 'a species of matter of a definite chemical composition', as the OED puts it, dating its first example of the use of 'substance' in this sense at 1732.

Perhaps Coleridge we might say is off on one. He is using his sophisticated familiarity with notions that were on the life support mechanism of philosophy and theology to attempt the articulation of an incoherence.

I must defend the interpretation here that effective thinking about the human being changed hands at the end of the 18th Century. It changed hands, in effect, at the point at which philosophy began to distinguish itself from science: the Kantian schism.

bud

Schelling's conception of the mind as a locus of activity

Here is the best a modern expositor can make of the self in Schiller:

What Schelling proposes is a vision of the Absolute as One, as a single multi-faceted, self-creating, continuously developing cosmos of which nature is one aspect, the human mind another... " Solomon, Continental Philosophy since 1750, Oxford, OUP 1988, p.54.

From the enveloping fog the notion of the individual self as 'self-creating' and 'continuously developing' emerges rather clearly. No distinction is made between person, mind or self; and what we have here is what I am calling the 'dynamic' conception of the individual's mind.

If we applied Hume's criterion of continuing identity, the mind here fails. It is under continual change, a locus of unceasing activity. Supposing we apply Hume's criterion, taking it to be coherent: an entity A is the same as entity B if it is made of physical components which are at least mostly numerically the same. By that test, my mind today is not the same mind as the mind I had yesterday. By that test, the idea of a mind made up of one bundle of ideas today and a different set yesterday carries the implication that my today's mind is not numerically the same as yesterday's.

But this is not the point about the conception of the mind that Schelling for one is articulating. My comment on Schelling's notion is not that for it the content of a mind is turning over continuously.

It is rather that in place of the mind as a cabinet furnished with mental objects (which may or may not be continuously coming and going) you have, with Schelling and the others, the mind as a locus of 'activities' - or perhaps 'processes'.

There are elements of Kant's conception of the mind that prefigure the thoroughgoing reconceptualisation that was to come. Experience for Kant is made up of judgements, and a judgment is an action. It onvolves bringing intuitions under the forms of intuition, and/or intuitions under the A thought for Kant is an 'intuition' or 'judgment', in either case an act of creation. The mind is not a quasi-location furnished with mental entities - 'ideas'; it involves a programme of creative activities. That is the aspect that is expanded upon by others later. But for Kant the mind is still something within which these activities take place. It is more than simply the programme of activities itself.

(The revolution when it eventaully went through conceived of the mind as the regime of activities. In just such a way the liver is not a structure which contains and facilitates chemical reactions: it is a programme of reactions, a programme which from a distance looks like an old-style continuing structure.)

With Kant there are intuitions and there are judgements: with Schelling there is 'self-creation' and 'continuous development'.

Bud 4th Dec

[Note: material on Marx copied to Marx_on_people.htm 10:02:06]

Marx

In Marx the new self makes a decisive appearance: a person is said to be possessed of species being or, possibly, 'a' species being, a something from which it is possible, according to Marx, for the person to be 'alienated'.

It is tempting, and defensible, to understand Marx's focus in his exploration of human nature to be the Romantic insistence on the central importance of creativity.

The worker on the industrial production line manipulates parts according to strict regimens, but creates nothing. The difference between an architect and a spider, routinely weaving the most beautiful of structures, is that the architect conceives of his product beforehand: that is, as it may be understood, the architect excercises that great organ of creativity celebrated by Coleridge, the imagination: but the spider does not.

Every creature, Marx says, has a 'life-activity':

" The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity." And the life-activity characteristic of the human species is, says Marx, the creation of the world the human being is to live in. Through this activity, he says, "nature appears as his work and his reality". It is thus the " fashioning of the objective" that constitutes his species-being.

We might be tempted to put the point like this. When prevented from engaging in that activity of creation, the human being is frustrated in a fundamental way: it is this condition, Marx would then be saying, that is alienation. "Estranged labour" such as is alone offered by Capitalism "tears away from him his species-life."

What is the relation, we may ask, between a person and 'species being', or between a person and 'their' species being, if this is the better way of putting it?

I have tried to express what make sense in Marx's thesis today by using the notion of 'frustration'. If we cannot exercise a capacity that nature (for us: natural selection) has built in to us, the capacity for making things, we may experience frustration. We will be pawing the ground, but without the freedom to charge. Under this understanding of what Marx must be saying the thing that is wrong with our human condition is that we shall experience as a regular or even constant thing a feeling we do not welcome, an uncomfortable feeling, a species of unhappiness.

Cannot Marx have this as his point? That the worker in capitalist society is necessarily unhappy, necessarily assailed by a feeling s/he would prefer to be without?

It is a point that he could certainly have understood. But equally clearly I think it cannot be the point he was trying to make in his discussion of species -being. His thesis rather is that the human being is somehow broken by having scope for creativity denied. S/he does not stop being a person. But there is to that person a faculty that isn't working. And this is what, for Marx, is wrong. Capitalism does not (merely) condemn its people to unhappiness, it maims them.

(Later, with a developed concept of the unconscious in place, Marcuse can redevelop Marx point in terms of feelings of unhappiness. He is able to maintain that people under Capitalism may be deeply unhappy without being aware of it.)

It is true of course that Marx thought capitalism did produce misery - at least among the proletariat - and he did after all attach great importance to the immiserisation that advancing capitalism would in his view steadily exacerbate. But he also thought human nature was systematically thwarted by capitalism irrespective of how individuals felt about this. They were made miserable as a matter of fact, yes, but the truly important thing was that they were prevented from living the life of a human being.

Why call this state one of 'alienation from one's species-being'', exactly? It is because if human creativity is thwarted it is not in the end a matter of one part of the human machine out of commission.

That which is creative is - the human mind or consciousness; and in the Cartesian tradition, to which Marx (and everyone else) belonged, the mind is indivisible. Alienation from one's species-being is the indivisible divided.

_________

Is the species being a 'part' of a person? Is it rather an 'aspect' of a person?

The difficulty of this question arises from the fact that we are talking about a person: a subject - a whatever-it-is that has experience. We can think of the subject as being separated from all sorts of things - family, nourishment, roots. But none of these does justice to the notion of being separated from one's 'species being'. A person is part-constituted by their 'species-being'. That is, it is their 'species being' that makes them human beings. How can a subject be separated from that which makes them the subject that they are?

Marx is insisting that the human subject remains a human subject even though in some way divorced from what makes them a human subject.

Both these metaphors contribute to an understanding of what Marx says. But it is not fully adequate to think of alienation from 'species being' as simply a kind of amputation. Nor, if an 'aspect' of a thing is how it appears from a particular viewpoint, does it do justice to the idea of this kind of 'alienation' to think of it as simply the closing off of some perspective.

A helpful figure is perhaps this. The species-being is the underwater mountain whose exposed summit alone appears above the waves.

The island such a this owes its fundamental nature to the great mass of which it is the only thing to be seen, and if by some portentous geological phenomenon the continuum between the two gets ruptured, you have a peculiar kind of radical estrangement. The mountain still its summit in a sense, and the summit the great body of rock beneath, but much of the communication has been lost. Upheavals below can still erupt into the summit region, but much of the goings on below will be cut off and unknown to the higher region.

There nothing wrong with saying that the mountain has become two, nothing wrong with saying that the summit has lost its perspective on the mass below.

If the mountain were not a physical substance but a mental one, what would we have to say? That after the rupture the one substance would have become two?

Dostoevsky

There are a number of figures invoked in the attempt to catch the difference between the Romantic conception of the self and the one that displaced it.

A third dimension is one. Foucault makes much of the figure of a table, providing a two dimensional surface on which the 18th Century thinks of things as spread out, a table which is 'broken up' in the 19th Century. A 'depth' develops beneath the surface.

The table is broken up by the irruption of time.

Let us come on to that. But meanwhile, can we do anything to clarify or justify the talk here of a third dimension?

We can understand it well in at least some spheres. Foucault invokes it specifically to throw light on the emergence of biology at the turn of the century, and here it is wonderfully clear and wonderfully illuminating.

[Here it is]

Painting is another sphere in which the third dimension talk works well. Painters after Turner had something more to be expressing than (what we now call) the appearance of things. There was something more profound to be reaching for, an essence, an 'inner' reality: an inner reality to be brought out, in that revealing phrase, in works of art that perplexed and outraged those that had no conception that there was anything hidden to be revealed.

In what way is the Romantic thinking about the human being one which introduces a third dimension? The person has inside themselves - and this their innermost self - an entity which is developing through time. In the 18th Century world the person lived in time, and changed within time. But in the 19th Century world, time is inside the person.This is like having an engine running inside you, a process not a structure, (a cpu?). Foucault characterises the post Romantic period with the epithet: the irruption of time.

THE INNER SELF NOT THE CARTESIAN MIND

The 19th Century inner self is not to be identified with the Cartesian mind. People had looked inside themselves as Descartes had done and been aware – explained themselves in these terms anyway – of mental content – 'ideas' in 17th century terminology. But it is a famous feature of the Cartesian mind that the subject not only had unique access to it, but also couldn’t be mistaken about what they saw there. The mind was, for Descartes, an arena in which the subject was all-seeing, in the manner of Bentham’s pantechnicon. (This is one reason why the metaphor of the theatre is limited – there is a lot that can be secreted ‘backstage’, but in Descartes’ mind there was no hiding place.) Objects in the mind were objects of awareness or they were nothing – the notion of a mental content of which the subject was unaware was not for Descartes coherent.

(The possibility of unconscious mental content creeps in under cover of ‘the heart’. It is her heart that is hidden from Emma Woodhouse before she becomes aware with a shock that for some considerable time she has been in love with Knightly - without realizing it. (Emma Ch 47.))

The 19th Century self transformed

Drafting

This adds up to what Foucault calls a two-dimensional conception of the human being. It is understanding the human being as a structure. There is a body, there is thinking.

What happend to the structural understanding of an animal was that each bit of 'structure' came to be seen as the surface appearance of a complex web of ongoing chemical processes. This is what makes Foucault's talk of the 'irruption of time' so compelling. What is the parallel reconceptualisation of the human being?Is this it? Habits were what appeared on the surface but they came to be seen as the manifestation on the surface of hidden ongoing processes...

The Romantics suggested: the underlying process was the realization of potential. A person's (18th)character - characteristic way of behaviour - is like a cloud - appearing as a structure but correctly understood as continuous flows of condensing moisture.

The Nineteenth Century processisation is exemplified by Dostoyevsky. Rashkolnikov engages in actions which can be observed, and they can be seen as falling into patterns. But what is going on beneath the surface? So far I am only in a position to show that something is going on there. Clearly, Dostoyesvsky wants us to get more from the novel than that. He wants us to understand something of the underlying processes. I think what he wants us to understand is that what is going on behind the scenes is - thought! The appearance of habits of behaviour is to be understood as due to ceaseless thinking in process. It is thinking of which the person is partially unaware.

Education is conceived of by Arnold as establishing processes of thought which it is intended will go on below the surface, producing what appears as the person's actions - and, yes, - at a different level - thought. the educated person, the morally sound person, will think well as well as behaving well. The thinking they appear to themselves to be engaging in is to be understood as the manifestation of deeper 'mental' processes established as on-going processes by a sound education.

You could take Hume's description of his own character as an example.

"I was a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame,my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless as well as to the studious and literary, and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them." History of England, (including Autobiography, 1778) See Lindsey Intro to Everyman edition of A Treatise of HUman Nature, p.viii)

Dispositions turns out to be capable of bearing a range of meanings in the 18th Century, including, "natural tendency or bent of mind" (OED) This part of Hume's description doesn't distinguish clearly between habits and drives behind habits.

Brentano speaks of processes not content

"Nephew of Clemens Brentano, he was ordained a priest in 1864 and taught at the University of Würzburg (1866–73). Religious doubts led to his resignation from the priesthood in 1873. To present a systematic psychology that would serve as a science of the soul, he wrote the influential Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). He became the founder of act psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns itself with the mind's “acts” or processes (e.g., perception, judgment, loving, and hating) rather than its contents. He later taught at the University of Vienna (1874–80, 1881–95) and published works such as Inquiry into Sense Psychology (1907) and The Classification of Psychological Phenomena (1911)."

"Brentano, Franz" Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service. <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9357989> [Accessed December 21, 2005]. Bold text VP.

Robert H Wozniak: THE RISE OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

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