Cogitation, Intention

“Besides access to the five senses and the common sense, the cogitative faculty in effect has a power proper to it, to know ‘non-sensible intentions‘. John of Jandun adopts a formula of Avicenna, which he read in Albert [the Great]. These non-sensible intentions are non-sensible properties of the things we sense. These are ‘properties’ of individuals, precisely those of things, and not general notions…. All that particularizes a thing and places me in a situation before it is not limited to what the external senses passively apprehend…. That which is sensed does not exhaust the properties [of the thing], and it is the charge of a faculty like the cogitative to know what the senses do not know” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 245, my translation throughout).

“Common” sense in Aristotle has to do with coordination of the five particular external senses, and especially with identification of objects and properties that affect more than one sense. His brief mention of internal “sense” was elaborated in the Arabic and Latin traditions to include imagination, memory, and cogitation or estimation. Brenet finds major differences between the accounts of Averroes and the 14th century philosopher John of Jandun, who was supposed by 19th and 20th century scholars to be an uninteresting, uncreative dogmatist who only repeated Averroes.

“Where nonsensible and non-sensed intentions are concerned, memory preserves the reflexive perceptions of the acts of sensation. In effect, I see and I know that I see, I touch and I know that I touch, etc.; that which I touch, I sense; that which I see, I sense; but that I see or that I touch, is not sensible…. A particular sense does not know its own operation, it makes no return upon itself” (p. 270).

This is a somewhat delicate point. It seems that in the course of its work of combining percepts from different particular senses, the common sense can be said to have perception of perceptions, i.e., a kind of second-order perception, that accounts for the reflexive element in experience.

Claims about reflexivity in experience are often overstated, in part because they are expressed as top-down generalities, and because they are used as what Brandom would call an “unexplained explainer”. I prefer Kant and Hegel’s more bottom-up ways of speaking about “reflection”.

Aristotle says in particular that we do not have direct perception of self. Self can only be a “mediate” concept, approached indirectly through the perception of accidents.

“It is the cogitative that ‘tells’ us that Socrates is a father, or a caring father…. The Parisian master holds that the cogitative is the principal of the powers of internal sense, insofar as it knows the non-sensible forms…. Memory retains the intentions known by the cogitative, and for that reason it is called the ‘treasury of intentions'” (p. 246).

On this account, the imagination-based “cogitative faculty” is thus responsible for all of what is commonly called our empirical “knowledge”. The role of “intellect” is only to extract universals from the intermediate abstractions of individuals that cogitation produces.

As background, Brenet develops at length the views of Albert the Great and Averroes on the so-called common and internal senses. On this subject, he says that Albert owes more to Avicenna than to Averroes, and John of Jandun owes more to Albert than to Averroes.

“[John] is close to Albert: the senses do not passively receive the non-sensible intentions” (p. 249).

What are here called nonsensible intentions only exist as constructions or inferences resulting from a kind of activity of the perceiver and knower that is concerned with individuals. In an Aristotelian context, knowledge of individuals is a matter of practical judgment, which is also the kind of judgment used in ethical deliberation. In effect all empirical knowledge is of this kind. Furthermore, our apprehensions of essence are reflectively derived in this same way — ultimately inferred from a consideration of accidents — rather than being simply receptive of “what is”.

“Intentions are accidental percepts. In a first sense, a sensible is called ‘by accident’ if it is not known by a particular sense…. A common sensible, for example size, is not directly suffered by a sense (sight), but it is necessary that we sense it in sensation proper: thus there is no color without a colored surface…. Things go otherwise with intention. On the one hand, the substantial individual Socrates does not as such affect a particular sense, since the only things effectively sensed are the sensible accidents; on the other hand, his relation to what we sense of him is totally contingent…. Here is a first reason for the characterization of the intention … as sensed by accident: it is not suffered, but added fortuitously to what we sense — we judge fortuitously, on the basis of that which we sense. But there is a second: we say of a sensible that it is ‘by accident’, not because it is not known by the senses, if the senses are incapable of knowing it, but if it absolutely speaking escapes from sense as sense” (pp. 249-250).

I would not say that this kind of intention is “totally contingent”, which would imply that it has no objective basis whatsoever. Even “fortuitous” sounds a little strong to me. But the main point here is that these “intentions” are neither axiomatic nor somehow simply given to us.

“The question of the object of the cogitative is decisive for the noetic reading of John of Jandun. It is this faculty that spiritually dominates all the individual powers of the human, and founds her intellectuality. The proper object of this virtue is the intention, which John thinks on the model of the ‘non-sensible properties’ ” (p. 250).

“Otherwise said, I know by my cogitative what it is that makes a human what she is” (p. 252). “The ‘substantial difference’ of the individual or her ‘individual intention’, [John] writes, does not in fact designate her substantial form, but a non-sensed property that follows from her individual substance” (p. 253, emphasis added).

“This all leads John of Jandun to assert that the phantasia of Aristotle — the ymaginatio of Averroes — is made explicit [s’explicite] in the cogitative. And if we want to translate the full sense of the major proposition of the Philosopher, … ‘The intellect does not think without the phantasm of the cogitative‘: the actus phantasiandi in reality is the actualis cogitatio, we do not think without ‘cogitating’ ‘” (p. 254, emphasis in original).

In this way of speaking, imagination in the narrower sense gives us the apparent wholes of experience. Cogitation works upon the details of an imagined whole, allowing us to more clearly re-identify and re-cognize the whole by bringing its characteristic accidents into focus.

“This is again to say that the intelligible species, which proceeds from my phantasms, has nothing eternal about it, is not perpetually subjected in the intellect…. In itself, once again, the intelligible species does not exist. It only persists when the phantasms that cause it persist” (p. 255).

John of Jandun is among those medieval authors who contest the idea that intelligible species come to us directly in any simple way. They are not pre-formed. For him they are our constructs.

“He insists that the intention, which causes the universal, is imagined…. The phantasm, in general again, directly engenders the universal, without the mediation of the agent intellect” (p. 257).

It seems that John wants the eliciting of intentions to be entirely immanent to imagination in the broader sense. Here we are not far from the self-contained cogito of Descartes. “The” cogito is a reification of the immanent activity of the cogitative.

“What is the act of the cogitative? We must not reduce it to the distinction of non-sensed intentions. The cogitative knows all the individual material forms…. The cogitative integrally knows the singular, and each of its phantasms comes back to one of the determinations of the ‘thing’.” (p. 258-259).

In other words, the cogitative subsumes all empirical “knowledge”.

“The imagination receives a sensible form from the common sense; the cogitative knows that same form, but in another mode, for sure always individual, but less sensible: subtilized” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

“Each thought depends systematically on two phantasms: the imaginative and the memorative” (p. 262).

Without imagination, we would have no sense of anything being “present” to us. Without memory, nothing would have coherent connection. These are neither guaranteed to be true nor merely subjective. Here we are in a space in between what is merely subjective, and what is supposed to be objective and unconditionally true.

“What is the ‘passive’ or passible intellect? The Long Commentary [of Averroes] says it is ‘the imaginative faculty'” (p. 265).

In Averroes, the passive or passible “intellect” is a third thing, distinct from both the “agent” and the “material” intellect, and human thought involves all three. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to explain human intellect entirely in terms of the immanent imaginative faculty. John rather forcibly reads this view into Averroes, who would have rejected it as one-sided.

“Ymaginatio in Averroes has a specific sense and a generic sense. The first properly concerns the faculty that receives sensible forms from the senses, one of the faculties of internal sense. The second on the other hand has a much larger extension, and stands for the ensemble of these faculties, as well as their combination” (ibid).

“It is not upon the image in a strict sense — that is to say, upon the block of percepts that the imagination holds in reserve — that the agent intellect operates to extract the intelligible, but upon the product of a first denuding, upon that which the cogitative extracts from the image…. Thought does not just obtain a partial supplement of information, or an ultimate incitation; it requires as its condition that [the cogitative] refine the otherwise uninterpretable data of sensation or of the imaginative” (p. 266).

There is no such thing as “raw sense data”. Modern discussions of Aristotelian abstraction have often presupposed an unproblematic binary distinction between what is abstracted and what is not, just as discussions of Kant have often made too much of a dualism between understanding and intuition. This is a delicate point, because we equally want to avoid obliterating the distinction, and to avoid reifying the distinction into a dualism. It is an instance of the old Platonic problem of the One and the Many, where (I would maintain) all the interest is in the in-between parts.

“The cogitative com-poses the intention of the imagined form with its individual…. Remembering consists in bringing back (to present consciousness) an intention of the past…. But again the representation of an intention is not a memory…. [I]t is necessary to search… to recompose the imagined form with its individual…. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination” (p. 267).

This need to search and re-compose again expresses the active aspect of all interpretation.

“The cogitative re-composes what has been decomposed. It restores an integrity. It is the idol of the sensed thing that it tries to retrieve, and this idol does not in any way exist intact. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination. It is not the memory of an image that we seek, not the memory of an intention, but indeed the memory of a thing, by the reconstitution of the best experience of it, the richest and most faithful to the singularities of sensation” (pp. 267-268).

Next in this series: Turn to a Subject

Imagination: Aristotle, Kant

In the glossary to his translation of Aristotle’s On the Soul, Joe Sachs nicely summarizes the various roles of phantasia or “imagination” in Aristotle:

“A power of the soul that perceives appearances when perceptible things are absent and thinks without distinguishing universals (429a 4-8, 434a 5-11). The imagination is identified in On Memory and Recollection as the primary perceptive power of the soul (449b 31 – 450a 15). Thus, many activities discovered in On the Soul may be collected and attributed to the imagination, such as perceiving common and incidental objects of the senses, being aware that we are perceiving, discriminating among the objects of the different senses (425a 14 – b 25), distinguishing flesh or water (429b 10-18), and perceiving time (433b 7). Also, implicit within the power of imagination to behold images (phantasmata), there must be imagination in a second sense, eikasia, by which we can see an image as an image (eikon) or likeness (On Memory and Recollection 450b 12-27)” (pp. 194-195; citations in original).

In the above, I would particularly highlight “thinking without distinguishing universals” and “being aware that we are perceiving”. Imagination — and not intellect, for instance — seems to me to be the primary source suggested in Aristotle for what we, following Locke, call “consciousness”. Also noteworthy is language suggestive of what Kant would later call synthesis.

The vital implication here is that the closest analogue of “consciousness” in Aristotle comes into being not as a transparent medium of representation, but rather as a shifting collection of concrete forms in imagination. Further, the forms we experience are not just passively received, but actively organized and discriminated at a pre-conscious level. Thus when Aristotle says — as he also does — that, e.g., the eye is essentially passive in receiving forms as differentiations in received light — this latter is intended at a purely physical level, and is far from providing a full account of, e.g., visual perception by a human.

Prior to Descartes’ confabulation of scholastic “cogitation” and “intellection”, concrete human psychic activity or “cogitation” was generally recognized as having its roots in imagination. Intellection was understood to have a more specialized role, focused on the constitution of universals. However, attempts to reconcile Aristotle with Plotinus and Proclus in the Arabic tradition, and then with Augustine and pseudo-Dionysius in the Latin tradition, provided a background that was ultimately very supportive toward Aquinas’ strong claim that intellect must after all be understood as the leading part of the individual human soul, morally responsible for all its concrete thoughts and actions. This made it far more plausible for Descartes to take the further step — which Locke followed — of simply identifying cogitation and intellection. The self-transparency of the cogito in Descartes and of consciousness in Locke, respectively — along with their identification with intellection — served to marginalize the role of forms in imagination in their conceptions of “mind”.

A very important feature of Kant’s work that is relatively little appreciated is that he restored a central role for “imagination” in philosophical psychology and anthropology. For Kant, humans can have neither direct knowledge of empirical facts or objects, nor any knowledge of transcendent realities. All intellection and knowledge are discursive, as I think Aristotle would have agreed. We have immediate though “blind” intuition of a sensible manifold, but intellectual intuition is an oxymoron, because intellection is inherently discursive. And in between the synthesis of initial sensory apprehension in intuition and the synthesis of recognition in the concept (Kant’s equivalent for intellection) comes a crucial synthesis of reproduction in imagination. Though his terminology is quite different, Kant not only recovers but even expands upon the role that imagination played in Aristotle.

In Kant and the Capacity to Judge, Beatrice Longuenesse carefully develops what Kant says about imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason. This is a major dimension of her book, so I can only give a flavor of it here.

“The imagination ‘in which’ there is reproduction is not the imagination as a faculty or power (Einbildungskraft), but the representation produced by this faculty (Einbildung)” (p. 35). Though Kant uses the terminology of representation, this effectively refers to the same forms in imagination that Aristotle emphasized.

“[Kant] shows that these acts of combination can contribute to the cognition of a phaenomenon, an object distinct from the ‘indeterminate object of empirical intuition’ (Erscheinung [or mere appearance]), only if they all belong to one and the same act of synthesis of the spatiotemporal manifold. The form of this act is determined a priori by the nature of our mind, and its outcome is threefold: the manifold of intuition represented ‘as’ manifold, the representation of imagination (Einbildung) emerging from empirical associations, and finally the universal representation or concept, under which particular representations are subsumed. This act is that very act of synthesis which Kant, in section 10, attributes to the imagination, in the A Deduction [of the categories] more precisely to transcendental imagination, and which in the B Deduction he calls synthesis speciosa, figurative synthesis” (pp. 35-36).

As usual in Kant, “transcendental” means not metaphysical, but simply constitutive in a way that is not reducible to empirical events. Longuenesse points out that imagination in Kant is not merely reproductive, but also productive. In any case, for Kant not only the logical “matter” but also the elaborated form of our fully constituted experience owes a great deal to imagination, and a recognition of this — as opposed to the assumption of a putative transparency of consciousness — is fundamental to the “Critical” attitude Kant aimed to promote. Here I am using “form” in a sense more Aristotelian than Kantian. (See also Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis; Imagination, Emotion, Opinion; Animal Imagination; Imagination; Four Layers of Being Human.)

Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis

At the beginning of book 2 of Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur lays out the plan for the rest of the work. As I guessed, he says the final result will be a much more reconciling view, but he thinks it is important to first lay out the potential conflict between psychoanalysis and other hermeneutics in a very stark way, before successively tempering it through several layers of further considerations. The initial stark reading “governs the ascesis of that narcissism that wishes to be taken for the true Cogito. Hence this reading and its harsh schooling will not be retracted but rather preserved in the final reading” (p. 60). Nonetheless, the opposition will be greatly refined. “The whole movement of this book consists in a gradual readjusting of that initial position…. In the end it may seem that… Freud is nowhere because he is everywhere” (pp. 59-60; see also Conflicting Hermeneutics.)

Next in this series: Psychoanalytic Interpretation