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

Emotion and Belief

“The Hellenistic thinkers see the goal of philosophy as a transformation of the inner world of belief and desire through the use of rational argument. And within the inner world they focus above all on the emotions — on anger, fear, grief, love, pity, gratitude, and their many relatives and subspecies. In Aristotle’s ethical thought we see, on the one hand, a view about the nature of the emotions that adumbrates many ingredients of the more fully developed Hellenistic views. Emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and therefore responsive to cognitive modification. On the other hand, we find a normative view about the role of the emotions inside the good human life that is sharply opposed to all the Hellenistic views, since it calls for cultivation of many emotions as valuable and necessary parts of virtuous agency” (Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 78).

“Why, then, does Aristotle adopt an analysis of emotion that resembles that of the Hellenistic thinkers, while at the same time advancing a very different normative view of their role?” (p. 79).

That is, Aristotle gives emotions a positive role in virtue, but his Hellenistic critics advocated both the possibility and the rightness of separating oneself from all emotion, root and branch.

“According to some influential modern views that have left a deep mark on popular stereotypes, emotions like grief, anger, and fear come from an animal irrational side of the personality that is to be sharply distinguished from its capacity for reasoning and for forming beliefs. Emotions are simply bodily reactions, whereas reasoning involves complex intentionality — directedness toward an object, a discriminating view of the object. Emotions are unlearned or innate, whereas beliefs are learned in society. Emotions are impervious to teaching and argument, beliefs can be modified by teaching” (ibid).

“This, however, was not the view of the emotions held by any major ancient Greek thinker. If we schematically lay out the common ground of their agreement, we will be in a better position to appreciate Aristotle’s specific analyses :

“1. Emotions are forms of intentional awareness: that is (since no ancient term corresponds precisely to these terms), they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature’s point of view. Anger, for example, is not, or not simply, a bodily reaction (such as a boiling of the blood). To give an adequate account of it, one must mention the object to which it is directed, what it is about and for. And when we do this, we characterize the object as it is seen by the person experiencing the emotion, whether that view is correct or not: my anger depends upon the way I view you and what you have done, not on the way you really are or what you really have done.
“2. Emotions have a very intimate relationship to beliefs, and can be modified by a modification of belief. My anger, for example, requires a belief that I have been deliberately wronged by someone in a more than trivial way. Should I decide that this belief was false (that the alleged wrong did not in fact take place, or was not in fact a wrong, or was not done by the person in question, or was not done deliberately) my anger will be removed, or shift its target….
“3. All this being so, emotions may appropriately be assessed as rational or irrational, and also (independently) as true or false, depending on the character of the beliefs that are their basis or ground. Thus, rather than having a simple dichotomy between the emotional and the (normatively) rational, we have a situation in which all emotions are to some degree ‘rational’ in a descriptive sense — all are to some degree cognitive and based upon belief — and they may then be assessed, as beliefs are assessed, for their normative status” (p. 80).

“Even the bodily appetites — hunger, thirst, sexual desire — are seen by Aristotle as forms of intentional awareness, containing a view of their object. For he consistently describes appetite as for, directed at, ‘the apparent good’. Appetite is one form of orexis, a ‘reaching out for’ an object; and all the forms of orexis see their object in a certain way, supplying the active animal with a ‘premise of the good’. In other words, when a dog goes across the room to get some meat, its behavior is explained not by some hydraulic mechanism of desire driving it from behind, but as a response to the way it sees the object. Aristotle also holds that appetite — unlike, for example, the animal’s digestive system — is responsive to reasoning and instruction. He is talking about human appetite here, but he recognizes much continuity between humans and other animals, with respect to the capacity for acting from a (modifiable) view of the good” (p. 81).

“Where specifically human appetite is concerned, the case for intentionality and cognitive responsiveness is clearer still. Aristotle’s account of the virtue of moderation, which is concerned with the proper management of the bodily appetites (the appetites, he frequently says, that humans share with other animals), shows that he believes suppression is not the only way to make appetite behave well. Indeed, suppression could produce at best self-control, and not virtue. The virtue requires psychological balance (sumphonein), so that the person does not characteristically long for the wrong food and drink, at the wrong time, in the wrong amount. But this is achieved by an intelligent process of moral education, which teaches the child to make appropriate distinctions, to take appropriate objects. The object of well-educated appetite, he holds, is the ‘fine’ [or beautiful, or morally noble] (kalon)” (ibid).

“[A] loud noise, or the appearance of enemy troops, may produce a startling effect, even on a brave person. The person’s heart may leap from fright or startling, without its being the case that the person is really afraid…. If the person is only startled and not afraid, it is clear that he will not run away: as the De Motu argues, only a part of the body will be moved, and not the entire body. The De Motu analysis suggests that we see in such cases the effect of phantasia, or ‘appearing’, without any concomitant orexis, reaching out, or desire. (Emotion is a subclass of orexis.) The question must now be, What would have to be added to this being startled, in order to turn it into real fear?

(Nussbaum’s translation and commentary Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium inspired my early brief note The Animal’s Leg Joint. That book of hers also contains a very down-to-earth elaboration of Aristotle’s notion of unmoved moving, using biological rather than astronomical examples.)

“The example resembles another one used by Aristotle in the sphere of perception, where he distinguishes simple phantasia, appearing, from belief or judgment. The sun, he says, appears a foot wide: it has that look. But at the same time, we believe that it is larger than the inhabited world” (p. 83).

Here she translates phantasia as appearance. Often it is rendered as “imagination”. When I write about imagination in Aristotle, it is phantasia. This is an important term for Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as well, for whom it stands in between sensation and thought. For the Stoics, phantasia is a fundamental mode of presentation or representation in the soul that is also the object of a physical and physiological theory of image transmission that supports a kind of epistemological realism.

“Here it is clear that the something that needs to be added, in order to turn the mere appearing into the usual sort of basis for human action, would be an element of conviction or acceptance. It is in this that mere phantasia differs from belief. Although the contrast between phantasia and belief in Aristotle is sometimes depicted as one between non-propositional and propositional cognitive attitudes, it is clear that this cannot be quite the right story for our case. For the phantasia of the sun as a foot wide involves, at the very least, combination or predication. It is a little hard to see where to draw the line between this and the ‘propositional.’ The real difference between phantasia and belief here seems to be just the difference that the Stoics will bring forward as the difference between phantasia and belief: in the former case, the sun strikes me as being a foot wide, but I don’t commit myself to that, I don’t accept or assent to it. In the latter case, I have a conviction, a view as to how things really are” (p. 84).

“Further pursuit of the question shows clearly, however, that no technical distinction between phantasia and believing is at issue in any of these analyses of emotion: phantasia is used, in the rare cases where it is used, simply as the verbal noun of phainesthai, ‘appear’. The passage contains no suggestion that phantasia is being distinguished from doxa, belief. And indeed Aristotle feels free to use belief-words such as dokein and oiesthai in connection with his analyses of emotions” (p. 85).

She turns to a discussion of particular emotions.

“In short: fear, as described in this chapter, is a peculiarly human experience with a rich intentional awareness of its object, resting on beliefs and judgments of many sorts, both general and concrete” (p. 86).

“[T]he distress and pain are not independent of the judgment, but result from it. Thus if the judgment changed, we could expect the feeling itself to change — as Aristotle himself insists, when he speaks of the conditions under which fear will be removed” (ibid).

“In short, these emotions have a rich cognitive structure. It is clear that they are not mindless surges of affect, but discerning ways of viewing objects; and beliefs of various types are their necessary conditions. But we can now say more. For we can see by looking at Aristotle’s accounts that the beliefs must be regarded as constituent parts of what the emotion is. Fear and pity are both painful emotions. Nowhere in his analyses does Aristotle even attempt to individuate emotions by describing different varieties of painful or (as the case may be) pleasant feeling. Emotions, instead, are individuated by reference to their characteristic beliefs. We cannot describe the pain that is peculiar to fear, or say how fear differs from grief or pity, without saying that it is pain at the thought of a certain sort of future event that is believed to be impending. But if the beliefs are an essential part of the definition of the emotion, then we have to say that their role is not merely that of external necessary condition. They must be seen as constituent parts of the emotion itself” (p. 88).

“And we can go further. It is not as if the emotion has (in each case) two separate constituents, each necessary for the full emotion, but each available independently of the other. For Aristotle makes it clear that the feeling of pain or pleasure itself depends on the belief-component, and will be removed by its removal. He uses two Greek prepositions, ek and epi, to describe the intimate relationship between belief and feeling: there is both a causal relationship (fear is pain and disturbance ‘out of’ — ek — the thought of impending evils), and also a relationship of intentionality or aboutness: pity is defined as ‘painful feeling directed at [epi] the appearance that someone is suffering . . .’ ). In fact, both relationships are present in both cases” (ibid).

“Anger is especially complex: for it has both a pleasant and a painful feeling component, these being associated with different, though closely related, sets of beliefs. It requires, on the one hand, the belief that one (or someone dear to one) has been slighted or wronged or insulted in some serious way, through someone else’s voluntary action; this, Aristotle insists, is a painful experience. (Once again, the pain is not a separate item directly caused by the world itself; it is caused by the belief that one has been slighted. If the belief is false, one will still feel that pain; and if one has been slighted without knowing it, one will not have it.) Once again, these beliefs are necessary constituents in the emotion. Aristotle makes it clear that if the angry person should discover that the alleged slight did not take place at all, or that it was not deliberately performed, or that it was not performed by the person one thought, anger can be expected to go away. So too, if one judges that the item damaged by another is trivial rather than serious (peri mikron). But Aristotle holds that anger requires, as well, a wish for retaliation, the thought that it would be good for some punishment to come to the person who did the wrong — and the thought of this righting of the balance is pleasant” (pp. 89-90, Becker-number citations omitted).

“The subject of love is a highly complex one in Aristotle’s thought…. The general rubric under which Aristotle analyzes love is that of philia, which, strictly speaking, is not an emotion at all, but a relationship with emotional components…. The relation itself requires mutual affection, mutual well-wishing, mutual benefiting for the other’s own sake, and mutual awareness of all this…. Both in the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, the cognitive content of philia‘s emotions is made overwhelmingly clear” (p. 90).

“On further inspection, the beliefs involved in the central cases of emotion have one general feature in common, as Socrates and Plato already observed. All, that is, involve the ascription of significant worth to items in the world outside of the agent, items that he or she does not fully control. Love, most obviously, is a profound attachment to another separate life, which must remain as a separate center of movement and choice, not being engulfed or fused, in order for the relationship of love to be possible at all. And in the loves Aristotle values most highly, the participants view one another as good characters, therefore as fully independent choosers of the good; if one controlled the other, even to the extent that a parent does a child, the love would apparently be less good as love” (p. 91).

“Loves of a more than casual sort require a belief in one’s own lack of self-sufficiency with respect to some of the most important things in life” (ibid).

“In pity and fear, we acknowledge our vulnerability before the circumstances of life; we have those emotions, he makes plain, only if we really do think that life can do something to us, and that this something matters. Anger is closely related: for in anger we acknowledge our vulnerability before the actions of other people. Again, if we judge that the slight is trivial, we do not become angry” (ibid).

“Unlike the Socrates of the Republic, Aristotle does not believe that the good person, the person of practical wisdom, is ‘sufficient unto himself’ for eudaimonia, and therefore impervious to grief and fear. According to him, it is right to grieve at the death of a friend, since that is an acknowledgment of the importance of the tie and the person” (p. 93).

“A courageous person will indeed feel fear and pain at the prospect of death, on account of the value that he rightly attaches to his own life” (ibid). “A person who is completely without fear does not strike Aristotle as virtuous (which would imply the possession of practical reason) but, rather, as unbalanced” (p. 94).

“In short, there are things in the world that it is right to care about: friends, family, one’s own life and health, the worldly conditions of virtuous action. These can sometimes be damaged by events not under one’s own control. For these reasons it is right to have some fear. The good person, rather than being a fearless person, is one who will have appropriate rather than inappropriate fears — and not be deterred by them from doing what is required and noble” (ibid).

“Anger is treated in a similar fashion. On the one hand, Aristotle clearly believes that many people get angry too much and for insufficient reasons. His choice of the name ‘mildness’ (praotes) for the appropriate virtuous disposition in this area reflects his conscious decision to pitch things rather toward the unangry than toward the angry end of the spectrum…. If anything, he errs in the direction of the deficiency ‘for the mild person is not given to revenge, but is inclined to be forgiving [sungnomonikos]’…. Reason, however, does tell this person that there are some very good reasons for getting angry, in connection with damages to things that it is really worth caring about…. [A]ssuming one has made deep commitments to people and things that can be damaged by another, not to defend those commitments is to lose one’s own integrity. Anger is said to be a necessary motivation for defending things that are beloved…. It is this conceptual connection between anger and the acknowledgment of importance that explains why Aristotle holds it to be necessary for defensive action — not because it plays some mindless hydraulic role…. The mild person is not especially given to revenge, as Aristotle has said. But in the case of the deepest commitments, not to take some action seems to show a lack of ‘perception’ ; and if one has those practical perceptions, then one seems bound to be angry. Anger, in these cases, is a recognition of the truth” (pp. 94-95).

“Emotions, in Aristotle’s view, are not always correct, any more than beliefs or actions are always correct. They need to be educated, and brought into harmony with a correct view of the good human life. But, so educated, they are not just essential as forces motivating to virtuous action, they are also, as I have suggested, recognitions of truth and value. And as such they are not just instruments of virtue, they are constituent parts of virtuous agency” (p. 96).

“All of this is a part of the equipment of the person of practical wisdom, part of what practical rationality is. Rationality recognizes truth; the recognition of some ethical truths is impossible without emotion; indeed, certain emotions centrally involve such recognitions” (ibid).

“This ethical theory is critical of much that Aristotle’s society teaches. People often value too many of these external things, or value them too highly, or not enough. Thus they have too much emotion in connection with money, possessions, and reputation, some times not enough in connection with the things that are truly worthwhile” (ibid).

“While depending on belief and judgment, the emotions may depend upon a type of belief and judgment that is less accessible to dialectical scrutiny than are most of the person’s other beliefs” (p. 99).

“Aristotle’s students pursue not just their own eudaimonia but that of others: for they think about the design of political institutions, starting from the idea that the best political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which anyone whatsoever might do best and live a flourishing life'” (p. 100).

“In short: the apparent conservatism of Aristotle’s dialectical education of Nikidion [Nussbaum’s imaginary character] is only apparent. Radical change is excluded from the part of his educational scheme that deals with her as an individual. But that is not all that philosophy does. The individuals who do come to share in it partake in a task that is both radical and far-reaching: the design of a society in which money will not be valued as an end, in which honor will not be valued as an end, in which war and empire will not be valued as ends — a society in which the functioning of human individuals in accordance with their own choice and practical reason will be the ultimate end of institutions and choices” (ibid).

We still have along way to go toward that noble goal.

Conclusion of this series: A Few Conclusions on Emotion

Imagination and Reflection

I find myself advocating a quasi-dualist account of subjectivity grounded in imagination and reflection, on top of a non-dualist first philosophy that puts questions of value and meaning before questions of logistics.

Imagination lies at the basis of all first-order awareness. Closely tied at an organic level to sense perception and emotion, it immediatizes things into the form of apparently self-contained, presentable objects. Immediatization is a complex process of synthesis of awareness or “consciousness” that in a human combines what common sense would call impressions of external things with previous results of reflection. This initial synthesis of awareness or consciousness occurs outside of awareness or consciousness.

Once the immediatization by imagination has done its work, we are left with the appearance of a simple transparency of consciousness in which objects are presented. “Appearance” and “consciousness” are correlated terms — all consciousness is consciousness of appearance, and all appearance involves consciousness. Everything in consciousness is an appearance. Some appearances are well-founded, others are not.

It is reflection that works on appearance to distinguish whether or not it is well-founded, and that grounds any well-foundedness of the appearance. Reflection may also consider what is better in a given context. It is the basis of both practical and theoretical wisdom. There is no reflection without the involvement of consciousness at some point, but consciousness does not necessarily involve reflection. Reflection is an open-ended discursive relation, in which the identities of things are not necessarily taken for granted.

One of Kant’s important conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the figurative synthesis of imagination involves the same fundamental forms of judgment as conscious reasoning. Hypothetical (if-then) and disjunctive (distinction-making) judgments are what give meaning to both, and this is why reason can be applicable to experience: for us talking animals, all experience already involves judgment at a preconscious level. Reflection then involves a questioning and refinement (up to possible overturning) of our preconscious judgments that apply patterns of past judgment to new experience.

Figurative Synthesis

I wanted to extract a few more key points from Beatrice Longuenesse’s landmark study Kant and the Capacity to Judge. She strongly emphasizes that judgment for Kant refers to a complex activity, not a simple reaching of conclusions. She especially stresses the role of a capacity to judge that precedes any particular judgment and is grounded in a synthesis of imagination. (See Capacity to Judge; Imagination: Aristotle, Kant; Kantian Synthesis.)

At issue here is the very capacity for discursive thought, as well as “the manner in which things are given to us” (p. 225, emphasis in original), which for Kant involves what he called intuition. (See also Beauty and Discursivity).

Through careful textual analysis, Longuenesse argues that Kant’s claim to derive logical categories from forms of judgment makes far more sense than most previous commentators had recognized. For Kant, she argues, the “forms of judgment” are not just logical abstractions but essential cognitive acts that reflect “universal rules of discursive thought” (p. 5).

She recalls Kant’s insistence that the early modern tradition was wrong to take categorical judgments (simple predications like “A is B“) as the model for judgments in general. For Kant, hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (“if A then B” and “not both A and B“, respectively) are more primitive. These correspond to the judgments of material consequence and material incompatibility that Brandom argues form the basis of real-world reasoning.

Another distinctive Kantian thesis is that space and time are neither objective realities nor discursive concepts that we apply. Rather, they are intuitions and necessary forms of all sensibility. Kantian intuitions are produced by the synthesis of imagination according to definite rules.

“[I]ntuition is a species of cognition (Erkenntnis), that is, a conscious representation related to an object. As such it is distinguished from mere sensation, which is a mere state of the subject, by itself unrelated to any object…. One might say that, in intuition, the object is represented even if it is not recognized (under a concept).” (pp. 219-220, emphasis in original).

Before we apply any concepts or judgments, “Representational receptivity, the capacity to process affections into sensations (conscious representations), must also be able to present these sensations in an intuition of space and an intuition of time. This occurs when the affection from outside is the occasion for the affection from inside — the figurative synthesis. The form of the receptive capacity is thus a merely potential form, a form that is actualized only by the figurative synthesis” (p. 221, emphasis in original).

“[A]ccording to Locke, in this receptivity to its own acts the mind mirrors itself, just as in sensation it mirrors outer objects…. Kant shares with Locke the conception of inner sense as receptivity, but he no longer considers the mind as a mirror, either in relation to itself or in relation to objects…. Just as the thing in itself that affects me from outside is forever unknowable to me, I who affect myself from within by my own representative act am forever unknowable to me” (p. 239, emphasis added).

The point that the mind is not a mirror — either of itself or of the world — is extremely important. The mirror analogy Kant is rejecting is a product of early modern representationalism. We can still have well-founded beliefs about things of which we have no knowledge in a strict sense.

“Kant’s explanation is roughly this: our receptivity is constituted in such a way that objects are intuited as outer objects only in the form of space. But the form of space is itself intuited only insofar as an act, by which the ‘manifold of a given cognition is brought to the objective unity of apperception’, affects inner sense. Thanks to this act the manifold becomes consciously perceived, and this occurs only in the form of time” (p. 240, emphasis in original).

She develops Kant’s idea that mathematics is grounded in this kind of intuition, ultimately derived from the conditions governing imaginative synthesis. In particular, for Kant our apprehensions of unities and any kind of identification of units are consequences of imaginative synthesis.

“Extension and figure belong to the ‘pure intuition’ of space, which is ‘that in which the manifold of appearances can be ordered’, that is, that by limitation of which the extension and figure of a given object are delineated. Therefore, space and time provide the form of appearances only insofar as they are themselves an intuition: a pure intuition, that is, an intuition preceding and conditioning all empirical intuition; and an undivided intuition, that is, an intuition that is presupposed by other intuitions rather than resulting from their combinations” (p. 219, emphasis in original).

“According to Locke, the idea of unity naturally accompanies every object of our senses, and the idea of number arises from repeating the idea of unity and associating a sign with each collection thus generated by addition of units…. But for Kant, the idea (the concept) of a unit is not given with each sensory object. It presupposes an act of constituting a homogeneous multiplicity…. Thus the idea of number is not the idea of a collection of given units to which we associate a sign, but the reflected representation of a rule for synthesis, that is, for the act of constituting a homogeneous multiplicity. When such an act is presented a priori in intuition, a concept of number is constructed.” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

“Mathematics has no principles in the absolute sense required by reason. Axioms are not universal propositions cognized by means of pure concepts. They may be universally and apodeictically true, but their truth is based on the pure intuition of space, not derived from pure concepts according to the principle of contradiction” (p. 287).

Incidentally, Longuenesse thinks it does not follow from Kant’s account that space is necessarily Euclidean, as many commentators have believed and Kant himself suggested.

Aristotle, Empiricist?

In contrast with Plato, Aristotle made major contributions to early natural science, and was concerned mainly to interpret human experience of the world. I previously noted with some sympathy John Herman Randall Jr.’s argument that Italian Renaissance Aristotelianism played a much greater role in the development of early modern science than is commonly recognized. I cannot, however, follow Leibniz and Kant’s superficial association of British Empiricist philosophy with Aristotle.

Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were all much closer to Descartes than to Aristotle on key questions related to subjectivity. For all of them, immediate presence to the mind played a foundational role. (See also Empiricism; Aristotelian Subjectivity; Mind Without Mentalism.)

(Locke, Berkeley, and Hume all argued with rather more subtlety and sophistication than Descartes. Unlike Descartes, Locke and Hume did not treat the human soul as a substance, and all three of the great British Empiricists produced detailed accounts of aspects of human cognition that are of lasting value, potentially somewhat independent of the mentalist framework in which they were originally developed.)

Locke and Hume did extensively and systematically develop the notion — commonly attributed to Aristotle in the middle ages — that everything in intellect originates in sense perception. As far as Aristotle is concerned, this seems an overstatement.

Aristotle characteristically looked for multiple “causes”, or reasons why, for a given state of affairs. What I think he really meant to assert, in the brief passage in his treatise on the soul that is taken to support this typically empiricist position, was the more modest thesis that broadly speaking, sense perception provides the event-based occasions that drive occasions of thought. That does not mean that all the content (or form, as Aristotle would call it) of thought has its most direct source in sensation, although significant parts of it clearly do.

Consider something like language. Most concrete instances of language clearly have a sensible component, and those that don’t (such as when we silently talk to ourselves) arguably could not occur if they were not preceded by other instances that did have a sensible component. Without sensation, there could be no language. But that hardly means that linguistic meaning has its primary source in sensation. One could argue that sensation is always depended upon somehow even in considerations of meaning, but it does not seem to be the primary concern. Sensation by itself is a necessary — but not sufficient — basis for an adequate account of thought.