Tag: Perception

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

One, Many, Same, Different

Book Iota (X) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics extends the discussion in book Delta (V) of things said in many ways, going into detail on what makes things one, many, the same, or different. These are extremely important matters for any sound reasoning, though somewhat technical in nature. It also contains Aristotle’s sharp critique of the saying of Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”.

“[T]here are four senses in which something is said to be one primarily and in its own right, rather than incidentally” (ch.1, p. 185).

As to the first, “oneness belongs to what is continuous, either simply or, especially, by nature, and not by contact or a binding cord (and of these that is more so one and is more primary of which the motion is more indivisible and simple)” (ibid).

Continuity in a material is the lowest degree of something being one in its own right. That which is materially united by contact or by any artificial means would not be one in its own right.

As to the second, “[oneness] belongs still more to what is whole and has some form and look, especially if something is of that sort by nature and not by force, as those things are that are so by means of glue or bolts or being tied with a cord, but rather has in itself that which is responsible for its being continuous. And something is of this sort if its motion is one and indivisible in place and time; and so it is clear that, if something that has a source of motion that moves it in the primary kind of the primary class of motions (by which I mean a circular type of change of place), this is one magnitude in the primary sense” (ibid).

Being a whole is a higher degree of unity than being materially continuous. The association of circular motion with a strong unity is relevant to the upcoming argument in book Lambda (XII) about the first cause.

“So some things are one in this way, insofar as they are continuous or whole, but others are one because the articulation of them is one, and of this sort are those things of which the thinking is one, and this in turn is of this sort if it is indivisible, and an act of thinking is indivisible if it is of something indivisible in form or in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

As to the third, “a particular thing is one by being indivisible in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

These would include all the independent and non-independent things that were extensively discussed in book Zeta (VII).

He continues, “but that which is one by means of intelligibility and knowledge is indivisible in form, so [fourth] what is responsible for the oneness of independent things would be one in the primary sense” (ibid, emphasis added).

I expect that this last kind will turn out to be the first cause.

“But it is necessary to notice that one must not take the sorts of things that are spoken of as one as being meant in the same way as what it is to be one, or what the articulation of it is” (p. 186).

This is analogous to the distinction between saying something about something in general, and saying what something is, also discussed in book Zeta. He illustrates this below, with the example of fire.

“The same thing would also be the case with ‘element’ and ’cause’, if one had to speak about them, distinguishing the things to which the words are applied, and giving a definition of the words. For there is a sense in which fire is an element… and a sense in which it is not; for being fire is not the same thing as being an element…. And it is that way also with ’cause’ and ‘one’ and all such things, and this is why being one is being indivisible, just exactly what it is to be a this, separate on its own in either place or form or thinking, or to be both whole and indivisible, but especially to be the primary measure of each class of things, and, in the most governing sense, of the class of things with quantity, for it has come from there to apply to other things” (ibid).

Being one in the third sense above (being a particular thing) is now said to be “just exactly what it is to be a this“. This foreshadows an extensive one-to-one mapping he will develop below, between all the ways of the saying of being he elaborates in book Delta (V), and the ways of the saying of oneness.

He goes on to speak at some length about measures, which we would call units of measurement.

The most important point is that “a measure is always the same kind of thing as what it measures, for the measure of magnitudes is a magnitude, and in particular, that of length is a length, of breadth a breadth, of spoken sounds a spoken sound, of weight a weight, and of numerical units a numerical unit” (p. 188, emphasis added).

The distinction he makes here tracks perfectly with the way that different types, dimensions, and variables are handled separately in the operations defined by modern mathematics.

“And we speak of knowledge or sense perception as a measure of things for the same reason, because we recognize something by means of them, although they are measured more than they measure” (ibid).

The simultaneously humorous and serious caveat that “they are measured more than they measure” means that knowledge and perception are constrained by reality. More precisely, they are involved in mutual dependencies with the realities of things that they at once measure and are measured by.

“And Protagoras says a human being is the measure of all things, as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception, which we say are the measures of their objects. So while saying nothing, these people appear to be saying something extraordinary” (ibid).

Aristotle, at the end of his discussion of measure (longer and more detailed than included here), refers to Protagoras’ famous saying, commonly quoted as “Man is the measure of all things”. With uncharacteristic sharpness, he calls this “saying nothing”. Why? This seems worthy of a short digression.

Protagoras was a prominent Sophist, who appears in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. He wrote a controversial treatise entitled Truth, which began with the sentence, “Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not”. Plato and Aristotle both took Protagoras to be asserting a kind of individualist relativism. Reportedly, the skeptic Sextus Empiricus also read him this way. Plato took him to deny any objective reality. Aristotle in book Gamma (IV) shows rare outrage at his other reported claim that “it is not possible to contradict”. I didn’t mention him by name in my account, but Aristotle names him there as well.

Aristotle implies it is a bit more plausible to much more specifically say that knowledge and perception are measures of things, but even that only with the caveat that really “they are measured more than they measure”.

But why go on to add with such sharpness that Protagoras is “saying nothing”? I suspect the answer may lie with the other part of Aristotle’s interpretation: “as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception”.

I’m inclined to think Aristotle would regard it as outrageous to transfer what may (ambiguously) be said of specific knowledge and perception, to an unqualified saying about one who is said to possess knowledge and perception in general.

Aristotle has just given an account of what a measure is, that it must be of the same kind as the things that it measures. How could one thing (“man”) possibly be the measure of countless things that have no common measure? That does sound like nonsense. Any measure has to be of one kind or another. Modern mathematics agrees that kinds, dimensions, variables can only be collapsed together if very specific criteria are met.

What Aristotle emphasizes here about knowledge and perception — that they have a remarkable involvement with things that also measure them — seems very consistent with his general views. But the way Protagoras implicitly presents “man” as their possessor makes the possessor stand apart from the mutual involvement with things that Aristotle emphasizes, in which knowledge and perception and things measure one another. In splendid isolation from all constraints of real measure, the possessor seems to have arbitrary freedom to claim whatever she wishes.

I intuitively associate Protagoras with the attitude that what’s true for you is true for you, but what’s true for me is true for me, so don’t tell me I’m wrong, and I won’t tell you you’re wrong! Then and now, such sentiments had and have a superficial appeal, because they seem to express a live-and-let-live attitude, which seems to be a good thing. But the way it is expressed, in fact it completely undermines any possibility of meaningful dialogue, which undermines reason itself, which undermines the very thing that makes us human.

Back to the text, Aristotle turns to illustrating the one-to-one mapping I mentioned between sayings about being and sayings about oneness.

“[S]ince not even being itself is an independent thing as though it were some one thing capable of having being apart from the many beings (since it is common to them), other than solely as a thing attributed to them, it is clear that oneness is not a universal either” (ch. 2, p. 189).

For Aristotle, neither Being nor the One is an independent thing in its own right. He will nonetheless argue in book Lambda (XII) that there is a first cause for all things.

“What’s more, what is true about oneness must hold true in a similar way for all things; and being and oneness are meant in equally many ways” (ibid).

“And the same account applies also to the other classes of things, … and [if] in all instances it is the case both that the number is a number of something and that oneness is some particular one thing, and oneness itself is not the thinghood of it, then it must also be the same way with independent things” (p. 190).

“[S]o too in thinghood, one independent thing is oneness itself; and that oneness in a certain way means the same thing as being, is clear from the fact that it follows along equally through the ways being is attributed, and is not any one of them (for instance, it is not what anything is, nor of-what-sort anything is, but stands similarly toward them just as being does), and from the fact that no other thing is predicated in ‘one human being’ over and above what is predicated in ‘human being’ (just as being is not something over and above what and of-what-sort and how-much a thing is), or in ‘being one’ over and above being any particular thing” (ibid).

Saying something is one human being is the same as saying it is a human being. In book Zeta, he analogously said that “good” and “being good” are the same.

Things are often one in one respect, but many in another. The one and the many are “contraries, and not opposed as contradictories or as what are called relative terms” (ch. 3, p. 190). Next he turns to the meanings of same, other, and different.

“Since the same is meant in more than one way, in one way we sometimes speak of what is the same in number, but we say it in another sense if things are one in meaning as well as in number, as you are one with yourself in both form and material, and in another again if the articulation of the primary thinghood of things is one, for instance in the way equal straight lines are the same, … but in these equality is oneness” (p. 191).

In Fregean terms, things are what Aristotle calls one in number when they have the same reference. They are what Aristotle calls one in meaning when they have the same sense. Frege illustrates how they differ by saying that the morning star and the evening star have the same reference, but different sense.

“Things are alike if, not being simply the same, nor without difference in their composite thinghood, they are the same in form, just as a larger square is like a smaller one…. Other things are alike if they have the same form, and have it in them to be more and less, but are neither more nor less than one another. Other things, if they are the same attribute, and one in form, say white, more and less intensely, people say are alike because their form is one. Other things are alike if they have more things the same than different, either simply or superficially, as tin is like silver insofar as it is white, and gold is like fire insofar as it is yellow and fiery-red” (ibid).

“So it is clear also that other and unlike are meant in more than one way” (ibid).

“[B]ut difference is something other than otherness…. [W]hat is different from something is different in some particular respect, so it must necessarily be the same in some respect as that with which it differs” (p. 192).

For Aristotle, calling two things different presupposes that they can be meaningfully compared in the first place. This is not the case for things that are just “other” than one another. Black is different from white; they are both colors. But an apostrophe is just other than an aardvark.

This is followed by a ten-page discussion of technical details of contrariety, which I will mostly skip. Contrariety supports a definitive ruling out of some things based on other things. This has great importance for reasoning.

Incidentally, Aristotle explains why there is no essential difference between human beings with different colorings.

“And since one sort of thing is articulation while another is material, those contrarieties that are in the articulation make a difference in species, but those that are in what is conceived together with the material do not make such a difference. This is the reason that whiteness of a human being, and blackness, do not make such a difference…. For there is a difference between a white human being and a black horse, but that is not insofar as the one is white and the other is black” (ch. 9, pp. 201-202).

Finally, he argues that destructibility and indestructibility inhere in things by necessity. Whether a thing is destructible or not depends strictly on what genus of things its species belongs to.

“[A] destructible thing and an indestructible thing must be different in genus…. Therefore it is necessary that destructibility either be the thinghood or be present in the thinghood of each destructible thing; and the same argument also concerns the indestructible, since both are among things present by necessity” (ch. 10, p. 202).

Next in this series: Toward a First Cause

Aporias

“Aporia” is Aristotle’s Greek technical term used by many philosophers in English for what Sachs in his glossary to the Metaphysics calls an “impasse” or “logical stalemate that seems to make a question unanswerable. In fact, it is the impasses that reveal what the genuine questions are” (p. lv).

Book Beta (III) of the Metaphysics develops many such impasses. I take this as evidence of Aristotle’s extraordinary intellectual honesty and depth of insight.

Aristotle writes, “[T]hose who inquire without first coming to an impasse are like people who are ignorant of which way they need to walk, and on top of these things, …one never knows whether one has found the thing sought for or not. For the end is not apparent to this one, but to the one who has first been at an impasse it is clear. And further, one must be better off for judging if one has heard all the disputing arguments as if they were opponents in a lawsuit” (ch. 1, p. 35).

“About all these things it is not only difficult to find a way to the truth, but it is not even an easy thing to articulate the difficulties well” (p. 37).

For anyone who has been following recent posts a little, we have seen abundant examples of such challenging but fruitful impasses in the development of Hegel’s Logic. Those were not just some weird things that Hegel cooked up, but yet more evidence of Hegel’s profoundly Aristotelian approach.

Aristotle mentions a long series of such impasses related to the subject matter of the Metaphysics, including those about the nature and number of causes; whether causes are universal or particular; whether there are things beyond perceptible things; the status of mathematical objects; and whether there are causes that are independent of what he calls matter (or “material”, as Sachs calls it to help disambiguate Aristotle’s more “logical” distinction from modern physicalistic concepts).

“Furthermore, the most difficult question of all, that has in it the greatest impasse, is whether one and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not anything different, but are the thinghood of things — or whether this is not so, but the underlying thing is something different” (p. 36).

“And there is a question whether the sources of things are universal or like particular things, and whether they have being potentially or at work, and in turn whether they are at work in some other way or by way of motion” (p. 37).

“But now if there are a number of kinds of knowledge of the causes, and a different one for a different source, which of these ought one to say is the one… being sought?” (ch. 2, p. 36).

“And in general, is there one or more than one kind of knowledge about all beings? And if there is not one, with what sort of beings ought one to place this kind of knowledge? But that there is one about them all is not reasonable; for then there would also be one kind of demonstrative knowledge about all attributes” (p. 39).

“But it is not possible for either oneness or being to be a single genus of things…. [I]f oneness or being is a genus, no differentia would either be or be one…. And on top of these things, the differentia are sources still more than are the genera” (ch. 3, p. 43).

“So from these things, it seems that the predicates applied directly to the individual things are sources more than are the general classes; but then in turn, in what way one ought to understand these to be sources is not easy to say” (p. 44).

“For if there is nothing apart from particular things, while the particulars are infinite, how is it possible to get a hold of a knowledge of infinitely many things? For insofar as something is one and the same, and insofar as it is present as a universal, in this way we know everything. But if this is necessary, and there has to be something apart from particulars, the general classes of things would have to have being apart from the particulars…. But we just went through an argument that this is impossible” (ch. 4, p. 44).

“Now if there is nothing apart from the particulars, there could be nothing intelligible, but everything would be perceptible and of nothing could there be knowledge, unless someone claims that perception is knowledge. What’s more, neither could there be anything everlasting or motionless (since all perceptible things pass away and are in motion). But surely if there is nothing everlasting, neither could there be coming-into-being. For there must be something that comes into being and something out of which it comes into being” (pp. 44-45).

“And an impasse no lesser than any has been neglected by both present and earlier thinkers, as to whether the sources of destructible and indestructible things are the same or different. For if they are the same, in what way and through what cause are some things destructible and others indestructible?…. But about mythological subtleties it is not worthwhile to inquire seriously; but on the part of those who speak by means of demonstrations, one must learn by persistent questioning why in the world, when things come from the same sources, some of the things have an everlasting nature but others pass away. But since they neither state any cause, nor is it reasonable that it be so, it is clear that there could not be the same sources or causes of them” (p. 46).

“[B]ut if there are different sources, one impasse is whether they themselves would be destructible or indestructible…. Furthermore, no one has even tried to speak about different sources, but all say that the same sources belong to all things. But they gulp down the thing first stated as an impasse as though taking it to be something small.”

“But the most difficult thing of all to examine, as well as the most necessary for knowing the truth, is whether being and oneness are the thinghood of things…. But surely if there should be some being-itself and one-itself, there is a considerable impasse about how there would be anything besides these — I mean how things will be more than one” (pp. 47-48).

“So it is necessary to raise both these impasses about the sources, and one as to whether they are universal or what we call particular. For if they are universals, they will not be independent things. (For none of the common predicates signifies a this but rather an of-this-sort, while an independent thing is a this….) So if the sources are universal, these things follow; but if they are not universal but are in the same way as particulars, there will be no knowledge, since of all things the knowledge is universal” (ch. 6, pp. 51-52).

Next in this series: Being as Such?

Meaningful “Seeing”

We ordinarily “see” things with the appearance of immediate meaning — for instance, not just patches of color but recognizable objects and individuals. We experience these as having properties that we expect to hold under various conditions that do not apply at present. We also seem to immediately apprehend subtler aspects of situations that presuppose what Kant and Hegel called “reflection” to discern and express at all. This goes far beyond any simple passive registering of sense data.

The Stoics tried to bridge the gap between a theorized passivity of perceiving and knowing and the already meaningful character of experience in a naturalistic way, by positing some kind of material transmission of “phantasms” from objects to the perceiver.

Variants of this were adopted by many Latin scholastics under the name of “sensible species”. By analogy, Aquinas and others argued for the real existence of “intelligible species” that could be passively received by the intellect.

However, medieval nominalists already anticipated modern empiricism in rejecting both sensible and intelligible species, and medieval Augustinians argued for a much larger role of active powers of the soul in the apprehension of meaning.

Kant and Hegel broadly agree with the nominalist and empiricist critique of the theory of passive transmission of species, and with an abstracted version of the Augustinian thesis of the role of active capabilities in perception and knowledge.

How this all relates to Aristotle involves many subtleties, some of which are mentioned in Aristotle on Perception.

(See also Berkeley on Perception; Kantian Synthesis; Imagination: Aristotle, Kant; Taking “Things” as True; Husserl on Perception; Primacy of Perception?; The Non-Primacy of Perception; What We Saw.)

Aristotle on Perception

Real and meaningful analytic distinctions in experience such as activity and passivity need not be grounded in ontological dualities.

It is common to hear Aristotle summarized as asserting a monolithic passivity in processes of perception. This is a considerable simplification. What is true is that in the absence of something perceptible that does not depend on us for its being, Aristotle would say we have a case not of perception but of something else. This does not mean there are not many active dimensions to typical sense perception as well.

One of Aristotle’s deepest principles involves a recognition of profoundly mixed conditions as being more typical of real life than monolithic or homogeneous ones. Plato treats “mixture” as a first-class topic at the heart of what Aristotle would call first philosophy, and not as a mere derivative from “pure” concepts.

Later authors have often tended to downplay Plato and Aristotle’s emphasis on mixed cases in experience as normal, and instead to privilege pure “black and white” distinctions. I think we should if anything privilege the mixed cases, and demand evidence when confronted with claims that any real-world cases involve “pure” black-and-white distinctions.

Aristotle’s account of perception in book 2 of On the Soul relies mainly on descriptions expressed in terms of actuality, potentiality, and actualization. While it is true that actuality has a character that is mostly active and potentiality has a character that is mostly not active, it is once again an oversimplification to simply equate actuality with activity and potentiality with passivity.

Aristotle’s description of perception is deliberately abstract, which reduces the need to speculatively fill in missing details. Perhaps the most salient overall aspect of this account is that it involves a multi-leveled layering of actuality and potentiality and of active and passive aspects that may be only analytically distinct. He focuses very generally on the various requirements of the kinds of form involved, and works hard to avoid causal explanations not clearly grounded in evidence.

It is very characteristic that Aristotle treats perception and whatever is perceptible in a single context. For instance, his discussion of light occurs here. He has no theory of the transmission of light, which was only experimentally demonstrated in early modern times. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he sees light as instantaneously diffused through a medium, and reasons that the medium must therefore play a necessary role in perception. For him, light is “the being-at-work of the transparent as transparent” (On the Soul book 2 ch. 7, Sachs trans., p. 101). “By transparent I mean what is visible but not visible in its own right, to put it simply, but on account of the color of something else…. Light is a sort of color of the transparent, whenever it is at-work-staying-transparent by the action of fire or something of that kind…. What, then, the transparent is, has been said, and what light is, that it is not fire or any body at all, nor anything that flows out of any body…, but the co-presence of fire or any such thing in the transparent” (ibid). “Rather, the color sets a transparent thing, such as air, in motion, and by this, if it is continuous, the sense organ is moved” (p. 103).

It is important to recognize that this is a thoughtful interpretation of ordinary experience, with minimal assumptions. We would say, e.g., that light is transmitted at the speed of light rather than instantaneously diffused, but this can only be justified by complex empirical evidence. We associate colors with particular wavelengths of light, and we think of light as consisting of material waves (or alternatively, particles of a particular kind) that cannot be directly observed, but all this depends on complex evidence and test equipment. By contrast, Aristotle aims mainly to do justice to our ordinary experience of seeing things — a dog, a rose, a landscape, and so on. He seems to think of the air in the presence of light as metaphorically “charged” with sensible forms, such that there is a continuous translation of visible configurations of color through the air along each perspectival line of sight.

He somewhat paradoxically speaks of a “transmission” of “forms without the matter” in perception, and of the soul-as-active-form-of-the-body “receiving” them. The soul, as an entelecheia (in Sachs’ translation “being-at-work-staying-itself”, or more literally “in [itself] end having”) of an organic body, is active at root. Perception is then at top level supposed to be the being-at-work of a receptivity of the primarily active soul. Since the “transmission” of color through the air is said to be without matter, it must be more like a translation of color between the medium and the eye.

Some contemporary writers have claimed that Aristotle’s account of perception is of historic interest only, sheerly on the ground that it focuses on potentiality and actuality rather than physical causes. But as usual, Aristotle is far more interested in interpreting experience in meaningful ways, with as few assumptions as possible.

I think it is better to have a very abstract description that remains descriptive of experience, rather than imaginatively positing physical or physiological explanations. That is to say, it is better to be only abstractly descriptive but faithful to ordinary experience like Aristotle, than it is to have a more physically grounded explanation like the Stoics, at the cost of depending on additional assumptions of fact that turned out to be wrong in light of more detailed empirical investigations.

The Stoic theory — following the general Stoic precept that everything that has being must be some kind of body — seems to involve a kind of subtly material forms of objects invisibly but literally flying through the air as distinct wholes, ancestral to the medieval “sensible species”. This is a logically consistent physical and physiological account, which however makes numerous speculative leaps of the sort Aristotle aimed to minimize.

The mathematicians Euclid and Ptolemy geometrically analysed properties of light rays, but believed light rays were actively emitted by the eye, rather than received by it.

The “father of modern optics” and early contributor to scientific method, Iraqi polymath Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1040 CE), known to Latin readers as Alhazen, was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflected from objects passes to the eye, and to assert that the brain plays a major (active) role in the process of identifying objects. His work was taken up by Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Huygens, Descartes, and Kepler, among others.

The reception of light in and of itself is passive, but ordinary seeing has a large cognitive and interpretive dimension, whether considered at the level of events in the brain or at the level of an interpretation of meaningful content. Reception of light rays is passive, but even the most minimal identification of objects cannot be entirely passive.

The visible forms of patches of color that are diffused through the transparent medium in Aristotle — just like the reflected light in the modern account — are indeed passively received, but that no more makes the entire process of vision necessarily passive in Aristotle than it does in the modern account.

“But about all sense perception in general, it is necessary to grasp that the sense is receptive of the forms of perceptible things without the material, as wax is receptive of the design of a ring without the iron or gold…; and similarly the sense of each thing is acted upon by the thing that has color or flavor or sound, but not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute, and according to a ratio” (book 2 ch. 12, p. 118).

Joe Sachs comments in a note that “Some of the difficulty can be avoided if one keeps in mind that, by form, Aristotle does not mean shape or appearance. In the Platonic dialogues, it is always emphasized that the eidos is not the mere look of a thing…. That to which one must look, according to Aristotle, is the being-at-work of the thing. It is, then, no part of the analogy Aristotle intends with the wax impression, that the eyeball, say, becomes shaped and colored like an olive when it looks at one. What it takes on must be some sort of active condition” (p. 118n, emphasis added).

This last point about the active condition, I think, is the import of Aristotle’s phrase in the above quote, “not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute, and according to a ratio”. We do not directly perceive the kinds of things we perceive, but rather “that by which [things have] a certain attribute, and according to a ratio”. I take this to be a suggestion of what should or should not count as a “perception”.

There is a puzzle here about how “that by which” a thing has an attribute would count as perceptible. I would argue that if this kind of abstraction does count as perceptible in some way, that would be another indication that perception is not entirely passive. Aristotelian “perception” would then be quite rich, including many things I have been calling products of the Kantian synthesis of imagination. But it would still stop short of, say, directly apprehending a complex gestalt or whole “image” as an immediately intelligible unit.

Worries about “passivity”, it seems to me, ought to be directed mainly at the kind of claims of direct apprehension of complex images as meaningful wholes that Aristotle explicitly rules out in this passage.

“But ‘being acted upon’ is not unambiguous either…. For the one who has knowledge comes to be contemplating, and this is either not a process of being altered (since it is a passing over into being oneself, namely into being-at-work-staying-oneself), or is a different class of alteration” (p. 98).

“Being-at-work perceiving is described in the same way as contemplating, but differs in that the things that produce the being-at-work of perceiving are external, the visible and audible things, and similarly with the rest of the senses. The reason is that active perception is of particulars, while knowledge is of universals, which are in some way in the soul itself. Hence thinking is up to oneself, whenever one wishes, but perceiving is not up to oneself, since it is necessary that the thing perceived be present. And similarly too, even the kinds of knowing that deal with perceptible things are not up to oneself, and for the same reason, that the perceptible things are among particular, external things” (book 2 ch. 5, pp. 98-99, emphasis added).

I note first of all the explicit reference to “active perception”. Second, it makes perfect sense that “the kinds of knowing that deal with perceptible things are not up to oneself” — that in some way sensible things are what they are, independent of us, in a way that abstractions and universals are not. Aristotle even seems to think there is an at least abstractly identifiable level at which the particular senses cannot be deceived.

“[T]he means by which we live and perceive is meant two ways, as is the means by which we know (by which is meant in one sense knowledge but in another the soul, since by means of each of these we say we know something)” (book 2 ch. 2, p. 87).

“And neither is thinking the same as perceiving, for in thinking there is what is right and what is not right, … for sense perception when directed at its proper objects is always truthful, and is present in all animals, but it is possible to think things through falsely, and this is present in no animal in which there is not also speech” (book 3 ch. 3, pp. 133-134).

Here he explicitly bounds the analogy between perception and thought. We have already seen that perception for Aristotle is not entirely passive, so thinking, as something that is more up to us, must be less passive than that.

“And it is certainly not the reasoning part, or intellect in the way that word is used, that causes motion, for the contemplative intellect does not contemplate anything that has to do with action…. And even when the intellect enjoins and the reasoning part declares that something is to be fled or pursued one does not necessarily move, but acts instead in accordance with desire, as does one without self-restraint…. But neither is it desire that governs this sort of motion, since self-restrained people, even when they desire and yearn for something, do not necessarily do those things for which they have the desire, but follow the intellect” (book 3 ch. 9, pp. 152-153).

Later he specifies that the motion mentioned here is motion with respect to place, i.e., bodily movement, not anything directly associated with perception or thought. Comparatively speaking, the earlier “motion” of air in the presence of light was said in a different, more figurative way. We should not assume that the way activity and passivity apply in the one context is the same as in the other.

He continues, “But it is obvious that these two things [together do] cause motion, desire and/or intellect, since many people follow their imaginings contrary to what they know, and in other animals there is no intellectual or reasoning activity, except imagination. Therefore both of these are such as to cause motion with respect to place, intellect and desire, but this is intellect that reasons for the sake of something and is concerned with action, which differs from the contemplative intellect by its end…. So it is reasonable that there seem to be two things causing the motion, desire and practical thinking, since the thing desired causes motion, and on account of this, thinking causes motion, because it is the desired thing that starts it. So it is one thing that causes motion, the potency of desire” (book 3 ch. 10, pp. 153-154, emphasis added).

What Aristotle initially mentions as “obvious” is refined and corrected later in the chapter. This sort of thing is very common in Aristotle. In book 2 chapter 2, he says that “what is clear and more knowable by reason arises out of what is unclear but more obvious” (p. 84).

“[B]ut the potency of desire is not present without imagination, while all imagination is either rational or sensory” (p. 156).

The imagination is identified in Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection as the root of all perception. Here he suggests that it also depends on the particular senses. Both could easily be true if the sense in which imagination is the “root” of perception is teleological, rather than causal in the modern sense.

“For imagination is different both from perceiving [by the particular senses] and from thinking things through, and does not come about without perception, and without it there is no conceiving that something is the case” (book 3 ch. 3, p. 134).

Aristotle is saying that while conceiving that something is the case depends on imagination and imagination ultimately depends on the particular senses, we never directly perceive that something is the case. That something is the case is a practical judgment about particulars, rather than a perception. “Thinking things through” (dianoia) is discussed separately from pure thought or intellect (nous), and is a rational activity of the soul grounded mainly in imagination. To really “occur” in a human, pure thought depends on the activity of thinking things through as its vehicle.

“[F]alsehood is always in an act of putting things together…. What makes each thing be one is intellect” (book 3 ch. 6, p. 144). “[B]ut thinking what something is, in the sense of what it keeps on being in order to be at all, is true, and is not one thing attached to another” (p. 145).

Here he seems to be emphasizing that the idea of what something truly is, in the sense of being-at-work-staying-itself, is not adequately expressible in terms of a simple combination of pre-existing parts or independently defined features. Also, no expression of a “what” by itself forms an assertion that could then be either true or false. A “what” by itself has more of the character of a definition that could be either accepted by hypothesis or considered hypothetically.

If the thought of a being-at-work-staying-itself is simply “true”, it seems to me it must be true in some sense other than correspondence — perhaps a being-true-to-itself through coherence. This use of “true” is also different from the way it is defined in On Interpretation, where truth and falsity are said to apply if and only if we say something about something, which means a “what” taken in isolation would be neither true nor false. Only what is said about the what could be true in that sense, but then it could also be false, depending on what is said. So “true” is being said in a different, special way here.

“Knowledge, in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time, for all things that come into being have their being from something that is at-work-staying-itself. And… the perceiving thing is not [merely] acted upon nor is it altered. Hence this is a different kind of event from a motion” (book 3 ch. 7, pp. 145-146, brackets in original, emphasis added).

Here he emphasizes a distinction between motion in the primary sense of ordinary bodily motion on the one hand, and the actualization of a potential on the other, identifying perception with the latter.

Passive Intellect?

Pippin seems to accept the common gloss of Aristotelian (potential) intellect as “passive”. Although this particular equation of potential with passive is common among Latin scholastics, it is an interpolation that does not come from Aristotle himself. At the same time, scholastic discourse in general was actually full of talk about the human subject and its complex relations of activity and passivity, especially in theological contexts. Meanwhile Plato and Aristotle already also emphasized the discursive character of thought — its relation to dialogue and articulation in language, and the importance of development and mediation.

I think it is a serious historical error to say that Aristotelian “intellect” (nous) just passively receives intelligibles, and we had to wait for Kant to get any different view. What Kant did was to deny that the understanding (as distinct from sensibility) passively receives anything at all, while developing a very original account of the active aspect of understanding (and imagination) in the synthesis of experience. The historic source of the common-but-not-universal traditional assumption of an overall passivity of intellect is neither Aristotelian nor Platonic, but rather Stoic.

Aristotle speaks of potential intellect as being “nothing at all” before it begins to think.

The great Arabic commentator Averroes argued that potential and actual intellect were hylomorphically inseparable and only analytically distinguishable, and also that potential intellect, even taken by itself, had some active characteristics. Meanwhile he also spoke of a third, more passive “intellect” that was not really intellect, but rather associated with a part of the Aristotelian imagination that he called the cogitative faculty. Even this is not truly passive.

Alexander of Aphrodisias had described potential intellect in terms similar to that of Averroes’ cogitative faculty, and Aquinas partially endorsed the position of Alexander. On the other hand, unlike Alexander, Aquinas also located located actual intellect within the soul. Things are further complicated by Aquinas’ introduction of the natural light of reason and his defense of a variant of the medieval doctrine of passively received “species”. Neither of these comes from Aristotle.

Pippin doesn’t mention actual or “active” intellect explicitly, but all historic versions of Aristotelianism recognize some variant of this. In Metaphysics book Lambda, Aristotle repeatedly stresses the actual side of intellect. No one claims that actual intellect is passive. The problem is that Aristotle’s own account of intellect has a very minimalist character.

Aristotle himself is partially to blame for the historic unclarity on the activity and passivity of intellect. He suggests an analogy between intellect and sense perception. The latter is described mainly in passive language, though even perception in Aristotle is not entirely passive. I think the analogy of intellect to sense perception is intended only as a kind of first approximation in terms of something more universally familiar, but most of the Latin tradition took it as decisive, and treated intelligibles as things passively received. Still, this is far from the whole story about views of activity and passivity in the human being.

Pippin generally does a great job explaining Aristotelian points. This one about passive intellect is an exception. An extenuating circumstance is that Hegel too seems to have a blind spot on this particular Aristotelian issue.

I wonder about the relation of this to Pippin’s claim in a footnote about “the emergence of subjectivity”, “not just in philosophy but as a world-historic event. At the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, some sort of awareness that the world and others were not unproblematically available for observers and agents, but that the subject was in some sort of relation to itself in its possible relation to the world and others, was clearly emerging in Cervantes, Caravaggio, Shakespeare, and others, until it finally found its radical philosophical expression in Descartes” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 266n).

It’s fine to celebrate the creativity of late Renaissance and early modern literature, but the rather cliché reference to Descartes is disappointing after such excellent work on all of Kant and Hegel’s efforts to overcome early modern prejudices, and on Hegel’s explicit recovery of many Aristotelian insights, of which early modernity generally had lost sight. Standard as Pippin’s view is on the alleged pivotal role of Descartes in giving philosophical expression to subjectivity, it is simplistic and historically wrong.

Forms of subjectivity have indeed developed historically, but subjectivity did not just “emerge” in early modernity. This is a huge and intricate topic, in which I am extremely interested and on which I have written more than a bit already. Alain de Libera has made major contributions in this area with his “archaeology of the subject”. (See also Passivity Revisited; Eckhart as Philosopher: Background.)

Next in this series: A Logic of Being?

Sellars on Kantian Imagination

The analytically trained Kantian pragmatist Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is increasing recognized as one of the greatest American philosophers of the 20th century. It has been said that he played a central role in taking analytic philosophy from its empiricist beginnings to a new Kantian stage. He is known for his critique of the “Myth of the Given”, his work on material inference, and his concept of the space of reasons. I found an essay of his on the Kantian productive imagination.

He begins by contrasting two approaches to perceptual judgment. First is a standard empiricist notion that goes as far as possible in reducing judgment to grammatical predication, to the point where the perception itself is treated as a bare this, and all the cognitive work of judgment is concentrated in applying a predicate to the bare this.

“Traditionally a distinction was drawn between the visual object and the perceptual judgment about the object…. This suggested to some philosophers that to see a visual object as a brick with a red and rectangular facing surface consists in seeing the brick and believing it to be a brick with a red and rectangular facing surface: ‘This is a brick which has a red and rectangular facing surface’…. Notice that the subject term of the judgment was exhibited above as a bare demonstrative, a sheer this, and that what the object is seen as was placed in an explicitly predicate position (“The Role of Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience”, in In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, Scharp and Brandom, eds., p. 455).

Rather than pretending that perception gives us only a bare this, we should recognize that at least we talking animals live always already immersed in meaningful content. The most primitive human sense perception involves taking something not just as this, but as something with definite characteristics. This will turn out to be what Kant calls a schema, as distinct from a concept.

“I submit, on the contrary, that correctly represented, a perceptual belief has the quite different form: ‘This brick with a red and rectangular facing surface’. Notice that this is not a sentence but a complex demonstrative phrase. In other words, I suggest that in such a perceptually grounded judgment as ‘This brick with a red and rectangular facing side is too large for the job at hand’ the perceptual belief proper is that tokening of a complex Mentalese demonstrative phrase which is the grammatical subject of the judgment as a whole. This can be rephrased as a distinction between a perceptual taking and what is believed about what is taken…. From this point of view, what the visual object is seen as is a matter of the content of the complex demonstrative Mentalese phrase” (ibid).

In a nonessential decoration of the argument, he mentions “Mentalese”, a term used by analytic philosophers for inner speech. We need not concern ourselves here with whether or not there is a “mental language” distinct from, but patterned on, natural language, as this term suggests. The important point is that in every human perceptual “taking”, there is a kind of linguistic or language-like articulation, which we can express with a phrase consisting of classifying terms and syntactic relations between them.

“We must add another distinction, this time between what we see and what we see of what we see…. How can a volume of white apple flesh [hidden inside the apple] be present as actuality in the visual experience if it is not seen? The answer should be obvious. It is present by virtue of being imagined (p. 457).

“Before following up this point, it should be noticed that the same is true of the red of the other side of the apple. The apple is seen as as having a red opposite side. Furthermore, the phenomenologist adds, the red of the opposite side is not merely believed in; it is bodily present in the experience. Like the white, not being seen, it is present in the experience by being imagined” (ibid).

Here he seems to recall Husserl’s perceptual “adumbrations” or foreshadowings. Sellars is a bit more straightforward and explicit in attributing these to imagination.

“Notice that to say that it is present in the experience by virtue of being imagined is not to say that it is presented as imagined…. Red may present itself as red and white present itself as white; but sensations do not present themselves as sensations, nor images as images. Otherwise philosophy would be far easier than it is” (pp. 457-458).

When we imagine something to be the case, we are most often not aware that we are doing so. We simply think or believe that it is the case. As soon as we already have experience, what Sellars in the thin modern sense calls the “actual” presence of the imagined content comes to us as primitively mixed in with that of the perceived content. It takes work to analytically separate them, and any such separation always has a hypothetical character.

“But while these [hidden] features are not seen, they are not merely believed in. These features are present in the object of perception as actualities. They are present by virtue of being imagined” (p. 458).

As with Husserl’s “presentified” contents, the contributions of imagination are not theoretical constructs, but part of the experience itself.

“We do not see of objects their causal properties, though we see them as having them…. To draw the proper consequences of this we must distinguish between imagining and imaging, just as we distinguish between perceiving and sensing…. Roughly imagining is an intimate blend of imaging and conceptualization, whereas perceiving is an intimate blend of sensing and imaging and conceptualization” (ibid).

I like the way Sellars recognizes the interweaving inherent to these “intimate blends” of imaging and conceptualization.

“Notice that the proper and common sensible features enter in both by virtue of being actual features of the image and by virtue of being items thought of or conceptualized. The applehood [by contrast] enters in only by virtue of being thought of (intentional in-existence)” (pp. 458-459).

“The upshot of the preceding section is that perceptual consciousness involves the constructing of sense-image models of external objects. This construction is the work of the imagination responding to the stimulation of the retina…. The most significant fact is that the construction is a unified process guided by a combination of sensory input on the one hand and background beliefs, memories, and expectations on the other. The complex of abilities included in this process is what Kant called the ‘productive’ as contrasted with the ‘reproductive’ imagination. The former, as we shall see, by virtue of its kinship with both sensibility and understanding unifies into one experiencing the distinctive contributions of these two faculties” (p. 459).

Here we have a very basic Kantian point about the nature of experience — all perception involves imaginative construction. Objects are not just given to us fully constituted.

“Notice once again that although the objects of which we are directly aware in perceptual consciousness are image-models, we are not aware of them as image-models. It is by phenomenological reflection (aided by what Quine calls scientific lore) that we arrive at this theoretical interpretation of perceptual consciousness…. Thus we must distinguish carefully between objects, including oneself, as conceived by the productive imagination, on the one hand and the image-models constructed by the productive imagination, on the other” (pp. 459-460).

In common with Plato, Kant is at pains to point out that everything we experience — including everything we apprehend in inner sense — is appearance. I would say we also have “contact” with reality underlying the appearances, but we do not easily get knowledge of that reality.

“Kant distinguishes between the concept of a dog and the schema of a dog…. [O]ur perceptual experience does not begin with the perception of dogs and houses…. But though the child does not yet have the conceptual framework of dogs, houses, books, etc., he does, according to Kant, have an innate conceptual framework — a proto-theory, so to speak, of spatio-temporal physical objects capable of interacting with each other; objects — and this is the crux of the matter – which are capable of generating visual inputs which vary in systematic ways with their relation to the body of the perceiver ” (p. 460).

Here he explains the important Kantian notion of a schema. Concepts express nonperspectival essences, but schemas are perspectival, involve potentially sensible content, and implicitly include a relation to a perceiver.

“Consider the example of a perceiver who sees a pyramid and is walking around it, looking at it. The concept of a red pyramid standing in various relations to a perceiver entails a family of concepts pertaining to sequences of perspectival image-models of oneself-confronting-a-pyramid. This family can be called the schema of the concept of the pyramid…. Notice that the pyramid-schema doesn’t follow from the concept of a pyramid alone. It follows from the complex concept of pyramid in such-and-such relations to a perceiver” (p. 461).

In a Kantian context, we have no access to a sensible world apart from a perceiver’s perception of it.

“However thin — as in the case of the child — the intuitive representation may be from the standpoint of the empirical concept involved, it nevertheless contains in embryo the concept of a physical object now, over there, interacting with other objects in a system which includes me. It embodies a proto-theory of a world which contains perceivers of objects in that world” (p. 465).

Here we have the basis of Kant’s “transcendental deduction”, which aims to show that perception and imagination effectively already presuppose the same categories that govern understanding. This is how Kant recovers the possibility of objectivity.

Intention and Intuition

Husserl continues his passive synthesis lectures with more discussion of intuition as a confirmation of the concordance of intentions. It now seems pretty clear that intuition for Husserl is all about the “presentness” of presentations, and unlike the common usage does not involve any leaps. He distinguishes between intuitions that are “self-giving” (principally, external perceptions), and those that are not self-giving, but instead involve a “presentification”, like memories and expectations. He discusses at some length the question whether it is possible in advance to know which of our general intentions and presentations can potentially be confirmed in intuition.

He speaks of intentions “wanting” and “striving” to be fulfilled in present intuition, but contrasts this with a wish or will. Instead, it seems to be a more elemental directedness toward filling in the metaphorical hole in what he calls the “empty” intentions that are not correlated to a present object in intuition from external perception. Preconscious beliefs about an external object are subject to a kind of preconscious corroboration by comparison to direct impressions from sense perception.

I like the quasi-personification of intentions and intuitions here, as “wanting” or “giving themselves” (see Ideas Are Not Inert). Plato in the Republic compared the soul to a city or community of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, thus suggesting that the kind of unity the soul has is comparable to the kind of unity a concrete community has. All our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions thus need not be attributed monolithically to a single, central agent; rather, our agency as individuals is the combined effect of numerous specialized, more or less cooperating but somewhat decentralized agencies.

All our intentions “want” to coalesce into the unity of a world.

“That we have a consciousness of our own life as a life endlessly streaming along; that we continually have an experiencing consciousness in this life, but in connection to this in the widest parameters, an emptily presenting consciousness of an environing-world — this is the accomplishment of unity out of manifold, multifariously changing intentions, intuitive and non-intuitive intentions that are nonetheless concordant with one another: intentions that in their particularity coalesce to form concrete syntheses again and again. But these complex syntheses cannot remain isolated. All particular syntheses, through which things in perception, in memory, etc., are given, are surrounded by a general milieu of empty intentions being ever newly awakened; and they do not float there in an isolated manner, but rather, are themselves synthetically intertwined with one another. For us the universal synthesis of harmonizing intentional syntheses corresponds to ‘the’ world, and belonging to it is a universal belief-certainty.”

“Yet as we already mentioned, there are breaks here and there, discordances; many a partial belief is crossed out and becomes a disbelief, many a doubt arises and remains unsolved for a time, and so forth. But ultimately, proper to every disbelief is a positive belief of a new materially relevant sense, to every doubt a materially relevant solution; and now if the world gets an altered sense through many particular changes, there is a unity of synthesis in spite of such alterations running through the successive sequence of universal intendings of a world — it is one and the same world, an enduring world, only, as we say, corrected in its particular details, which is to say, freed from ‘false apprehensions’; it is in itself the same world. All of this seems very simple, and yet it is full of marvelous enigmas and gives rise to profound considerations” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, pp. 145-146).

Active and Passive

“What strikes us now is the ambiguity in speaking of a decision that come[s] to pass on its own or in the matter itself, namely, as undergoing a decision that just arises, and the deciding position-taking that is carried out on the part of the ego as the ego’s reaction” (Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 92).

At this point in his lectures on passive synthesis, Husserl is beginning to explicitly consider the interrelation of passive and active aspects in perception and judgment, which had already implicitly arisen earlier. He rightly recognizes that there is an important relative distinction between preconscious and conscious dimensions of the overall process.

Already at the outset, though, it appears again that the active aspects seem to be straightforwardly attributed to the ego. A bit later, the shorthand phrase “egoic acts” that troubled me in the previous post gets repeated and elaborated. I still think it would be less prejudicial to attribute the (more) active aspects to something like “conscious deliberation and judgment”, and leave the postulated underlying ego-agent out of it. As Beatrice Longuenesse put it in her discussion of Kant’s treatment of related subject matter, “I who affect myself from within by my own representative act am forever unknowable to me”. I prefer to speak of the process of continually approaching and re-approaching a teleological unity of apperception, rather than punctual acts of an ego. But this is Husserl, who is well known for believing in a unitary rational ego. Luckily, most of his development does not really depend on this.

The other worry that occurs to me here is that the above-quoted passage is far from unique in emphasizing the place of decision on the active side. For instance, he says, “Judging is always deciding this or that…. In all these actions, judging is always only a process of conferring or denying validity that stems from the ego” (p. 93).

I much prefer an Aristotelian emphasis on an extended process of deliberation, and the point of view that it is the rational course of the deliberation that drives the eventual conclusion or choice, rather than a punctual, “free” decision. Larger patterns of activity, I say, are far more important than punctual acts, and subsume anything that can be explained by punctual acts. I had been hoping Husserl would come closer to this.

“[T]he ego passes judgment on its own position-taking…. We will see shortly that this position-taking or this group of position-takings are completely non-independent from the standpoint of intentionality, namely, insofar as they presuppose passive doxa [belief]…. The ego does not always take a position judicatively in this strict sense [e.g., when] it simply perceives, when it is merely aware” (ibid).

I very much like the non-independence part, but the last part raises a new problem, in that it is said to be the ego that perceives and is aware. I prefer to simply say that we have perception and awareness, rather than that we have egos that have perception and awareness.

“[Our position-takings] are completely non-independent insofar as they have their motivation founded in what goes on in perception itself, in perception’s proper and potentially purely passive course. Perception has its own intentionality that as yet does not harbor anything of the active comportment of the ego” (p. 94).

The part about perception having its own intentionality seems to have been a guiding inspiration for Merleau-Ponty. However, Husserl’s reference to the “potentially purely passive” character of perception seems surprising in light of his important point about perceptual “adumbration”.

“‘Active acceptance’ is what carries out a peculiar appropriation, determination, thereby establishing this being as valid for me from now on and abidingly” (p. 95).

This way of putting things seems perfectly fine as it stands, though it is followed by a long ego-centric elaboration. The ego talk continues into the part on “questioning as a multilayered striving”, where, e.g., he refers to questioning as “an activity that is obviously peculiar to the ego” (p. 100).

I would say that questioning is an activity peculiar to rational or talking animals, not to their putative egos.

“[T]he cognitive life, the life of logos, indeed like life in general, runs its course in a fundamental stratification. (1) Passivity and receptivity. We can include receptivity in this first level, namely, as that primordial function of the active ego that merely consists in making patent, regarding and attentively grasping what is constituted in passivity itself as formations of its own intentionality. (2) That spontaneous activity of the ego (the activity of intellectus agens [agent intellect]) that puts into play the peculiar accomplishments of the ego, as was the case with judicative decisions” (p. 105).

I contrast “spontaneous” with “deliberate”, seeing the former as more tied to preconscious synthesis and the latter to conscious synthesis. Spontaneous activity of an ego identified as the agent of deliberate conscious synthesis therefore makes no sense to me. Husserl is not alone in this strange usage of “spontaneity”; Kant, though he doesn’t talk about an ego, seems to have preceded him in speaking of a spontaneity of reason. In both cases, I think the motive was to separate rational motivation from psycho-physical causality, which I do support. (See Spontaneity.)

Here Husserl also explicitly identifies the ego with agent or “active” intellect. It’s unclear to me what Aquinas would think of this identification, but it would only make sense on the broadly Thomistic view that intellect is a proper part of the soul and is the basis of our conscious awareness. I’m guessing Husserl was unaware of the subtleties of scholastic debates about intellect, in which potential intellect in fact played a greater role. (I’ve been suggesting that in Aristotelian terms, imagination rather than intellect is the main basis of consciousness, and attempting to relate this to the Kantian idea of a productive synthesis of imagination, which Husserl identifies as a predecessor of his own notion of passive synthesis.)

All in all, I’m disappointed with this part of Husserl’s text. In spite of his recognition of a sort of active receptivity that is intermediate between activity and passivity, this part repeatedly suggests a rather sharp duality between activity and passivity. Instead of a “fundamental stratification” between passive and active synthesis, I want to imagine a more dynamic interleaving working itself out over time, in which no part is completely passive or completely active. In particular, through shared access to memory, I think the more passive aspects may build on past results from the more active aspects.

It appears initially that the remainder of Husserl’s text does not have the “egocentric” character that bothered me in this part.

Enticing Possibilities?

After the interesting discussion of the “crossing out” of previous beliefs, Husserl continues his lectures on passive synthesis with a discussion of doubt and possibility.

In contrast to the “crossing out” that implements negation in lived experience — where a previous expectation is definitively refuted by a new apprehension — the mode of doubt represents a condition in which we experience conflicting apprehensions side by side in a modally weakened state, and the conflict remains as yet unresolved.

The mode of open possibility involves a different kind of modal weakening in which some more general frame has the status of “normal” perception and the associated subjective “certainty”, but unlike the simple case of normal perception, the associated halo of additional expectation does not converge on a single outcome, but rather diverges into alternatives, and nothing motivates us to preferentially expect one alternative rather than another.

What Husserl calls an enticing possibility, on the other hand, is one that we feel drawn to believe in. It is still only a possibility, and we may end up in doubt because conflicting alternative possibilities each entice us to some degree. I find this notion of “enticing possibility” highly intriguing.

“Motivation prefigures something positively, and yet does so in the mode of uncertainty” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 81). “Let us look back to the phenomenon of doubt. Whenever we speak of doubt, we also speak of propensities to believe. What occurs in the front side that is seen, together with its apprehended sense for the back side, may prefigure something determinate. But it does so ambiguously and not unequivocally. This happens when we become unsure whether what we see is a complete thing or a piece of scenery, for example…. In this way the normal egoic act of perception is modalized into acts we call enticements to believe. From the side of the objective senses, from the side of the objects given to consciousness, we also speak here of enticements to be, which is to say that affection issues from the side of the object, that the object exerts on the ego an enticing demand to be…. The sense itself has the propensity to be” (p. 82).

I was a bit surprised by the sudden introduction of an “egoic act of perception” out of the blue here. At minimum, any such reference takes us outside the sphere of passive synthesis. But Husserl means to discuss not only passive synthesis but also how it is interleaved with active synthesis, and he has already implicitly broadened the scope in speaking of belief, doubt, and judgment.

My lingering concern is that I consider anything like an ego to be a teleological tendency, and I don’t take a teleological tendency to be the kind of thing that could exercise simple agency. Perhaps the agency implied here is not really meant to be simple. I do think that all real-world agency is non-simple (i.e., involves a mixture of activity and passivity), but Husserl hasn’t discussed the nature of agency, and his references here seem to suggest the simple kind that I consider suspect. I hope this will be clarified later.

Similarly, I was surprised by the reference to “objects given to consciousness”. Perhaps I am being too literal here, but his earlier discussion of “adumbration” in perception seems to me to rule out any simple givenness of objects as objects. The best connection I can make for a givenness of objects is to the earlier discussion’s mention of the object “in the flesh” that we always have, but that discussion makes clear that the “object” we have in the flesh is far from completely determinate. But what exerts an enticing demand was first of all a determinate possibility.

I think he is saying “object” in more than one way here. The object that exerts an enticing demand to be is not the “object” given in the flesh.

His statement that “The sense itself has the propensity to be” is also intriguing, and seems less problematic to me. If we substitute “sense” for “object”, it makes good sense to me that “the sense exerts… an enticing demand to be” (see Ideas Are Not Inert).

“Let us call these new possibilities problematic possibilities or questionable possibilities. We do this because the intention to make a decision arising in doubt between one of the enticing factions of doubt is called a questioning intention. We speak of questionableness only where enticements and contraposing enticements play off of each other” (p. 83).

“It is now clear that we have determined a closed and exactly limited group of modalities from a primordial mode of straightforward naive certainty” (p. 84).

Here he seems to be claiming it is “clear” that the modalities discussed so far are the only possible ones that could modify naive perceptual certainty. I don’t immediately have any other candidates, but “closed and exactly limited” is a strong claim that seems to come out of the blue.

“We can continue our exposition of problematic possibilities by noting that they and only they appear with a different weight. The enticement is more or less enticing; and that also holds particularly when comparing all potentially diverse problematic possibilities that belong to one and the same conflict and that are bound synthetically through this conflict.” (ibid).

I generally like the analogy of comparing weights here, though it is not clear to me that the intrinsic “weights” of all enticements would be commensurable.

“Such opposing enticements, opposing possibilities, can have differing weight; they exercise a stronger or weaker pull, but they do not determine me. Determining me in belief is just the one possibility for which I am resolved, for which I have decided earlier, perhaps in a process of passing through doubt” (ibid). “Different witnesses speak and present their testimonies, having different weight. I weigh them and decide for the one witness and his testimony. I reject the other testimonies” (p. 85).

“Yet I can potentially mark the differing weights without deciding in favor of one of the enticements…. For example, a cloudy sky together with humidity speak in favor of a thunderstorm, but not ‘for sure'” (ibid).

“[T]he fact that I let myself ‘willingly’ be drawn in, that I am about to follow it, is still something new phenomenologically. However, here this ‘following’ can be inhibited by opposing propensities, or not be ‘efficacious’ at all…. It is not merely the case that the one testimony whose enticement is privileged is stronger: We lend it validity, believing in it in our subjective certainty…. We can then speak of presumption or of a presumptuous certainty in a specific sense…. In itself, in its own phenomenological character, this presumptuous certainty is characterized as an impure certainty…. Obviously, this impurity, this murkiness, has its degrees” (p. 86).

An anticipation of this new dimension of our weighing, willingness, lending of validity, and “presumptuous certainty” is probably what underlay the earlier sudden reference to “egoic acts”. I have no issue with this more concrete development. The fact that he refers to presumption, impurity, and murkiness here provides a reassuring weakening of what earlier seemed overly strong.