Maverick Philosopher

The Man in the Mirror and Belief De Se

The following can happen.  You see yourself but without self-recognition.  You see yourself, but not as yourself.  Suppose you walk into a room which, unbeknownst to you, has a mirror covering the far wall.  You are slightly alarmed to see a wild-haired man with his fly open approaching you.  You are looking at yourself but you don't know it.  (The lighting is bad, you've had a few drinks . . . .) You think to yourself

1) That man's fly is open!

but not

2)  My fly is open!

Now these thoughts or propositions are different.  For one thing, they have different behavioral consequences.  I can believe the first without taking action with respect to my fly, or any fly.  But if I believe the second I will most assuredly button my fly.  A second point is that one cannot validly infer (2) from (1). That is because (2) says more than (1). For (2) says that BV's fly is open AND that I am BV.  When I refer to myself using 'BV' I refer to myself in the third person using an abbreviation (or a name) that both I and others can use. When I refer to myself using 'I,' I refer to myself in the first person using a word that only I can use to refer to myself.

So  (1) and (2) are different propositions.  I can believe the first without believing the second.  But how can this be given the plain fact that 'that man' and 'BV' refer to the same man?  The demonstrative phrase and the proper name have the same referent. Both propositions predicate the same property of the same subject.  So what makes them different propositions?

If propositions are Russellian, then BV, all 170 lbs of him, is a constituent of both propositions, which implies that these propositions are one and the same. But the propositions are distinct as has already be shown. So they must be Fregean.  BV himself cannot be a constituent of such a proposition: he needs a surrogate entity, a Fregean sense, to stand in for him in the proposition and to represent him.  (Note that this sense is both a representative of BV and a representation of BV.)  

As noted, (2) analyzes into a conjunction of 

3) BV's fly is open

and

4) I am BV.

Here is the point at which I am flummoxed and reach an impasse.  (4) says more than

5) BV is BV.

(5) is a miserable tautology. It is a logical truth, true in virtue of its logical form. Its negation is a contradiction. (4) is in some sense 'informative,' 'synthetic.' It smacks of a certain 'contingency': might I not have inhabited a numerically different body? Might not my epistemic access to the world have been mediated by a different body and brain?  

(5) differs in cognitive value (Erkenntniswert) from (4). But I am at a loss to say what this I-sense is. It has to be a sense, an abstract item of sorts, but what is it? What is the sense of this sense?  It appears utterly ineffable. The sense of 'I' when deployed by BV is unique to him: it somehow captures his ipseity and haecceity which are of course 'incommunicable,' as a scholastic might say, to anyone else.  

How eff the ineffable?  Hegel: there is no ineffable to eff. Tractarian Wittgenstein: Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche. 'There is, however, the inexpressible."

Do We Love the Person or Only Her Attributes?

Substack latest.

Gleanings from a passage from Pascal.

This supplements and deepens the recent discussion of subjective and objective views of death.

Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism . . .

. . . and whether the self is an illusion.

Top o' the Stack.

The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli

Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin what I will call moral self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects moral self-denial with metaphysical self-denial. Thus Buddhism denies the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of eliminativism about the self. Nevertheless, there are points of comparison between the 'No Self' doctrine of Buddhism and the Christian doctrine of the self.  Just as the full appreciation of the mother tongue comes only to those who study foreign languages, the  full appreciation of the 'mother religion' comes only to those who study foreign religions.

In his Combattimento Spirituale (1589), Lorenzo Scupoli writes:

You my mind, are not mine: you were given me by God. Neither are the powers active within me -- will, with its energy -- mine. Nor does my feeling, my ability to enjoy life and all my surroundings belong to me. My body with all its functions and requirements, which determine our physical well-being, is not mine either . . . . And I myself belong not to me, but to God. (Unseen Warfare, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995, p. 172)

I'll hazard a gloss: I am not the master of my fate nor the captain of my soul. Everything I have I have from God who created me ex nihilo and sustains me  moment-by-moment. I am not my own man. I do not have property-rights in my body nor in any attribute or adjunct of what I take to be my self. For this very reason, suicide is a grave sin. If a substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then I am not a substance: only God is a substance in the plenary sense of the term.  

Apart from the references to God, this meditation of Scupoli, of which the above is merely an excerpt, bears a striking resemblance to the  Anattalakkhana Sutta. Buddha there examines each of the khandas, body, feeling, perception, etc., and concludes with respect to each of them that "This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am." In Scupoli we encounter virtually the same litany: body, feeling, mind . . . of each of which it is true that "This is not mine," etc.  Of course, nothing depends on the exact taxonomy of the khandas or personality-constituents. The point is that however one classifies them, no one of them, nor any combination of them, is veridically identifiable as one's very self. I say 'veridically,' since we do as a matter of fact falsely identify ourselves with all manner of item both within us (feelings, memories, etc.) and without us (property, progeny, etc.) My house, my child, my brilliant insights.  A theologian might identify himself with his theology, when he must know that his theology could be light-years away from God's theology (God's self-knowledge).

These false self-identifications are part of what our ignorance/sinfulness consists in. (The forward slash in my typography stands for inclusive disjunction, the inclusive 'or.')

Thus Scupoli (whom I take to be a representative Christian, and who is of interest here only as such) and Buddha agree with respect to the (negative) thesis that nothing in one's outer or inner experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self. Thus nothing that we ordinarily take to be ourselves (our bodies, our thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.) can in truth be one's self. But there is also similarity in their reasoning. One way Buddha reasons is as follows.

If x (body, feeling, perception, etc.) were my very self, or were something that belonged to me, then I would have complete control over x. But it is evident that nothing is such that I have complete control over it. Therefore, no x is either my self or anything that belongs to me. This could be called the 'complete control argument' against the existence of the self.  Scupoli has something similar:

Let us remember that we can boast only of something which is a direct result of our own will and is done by us independently of anything else. But look how our actions proceed. How do they begin? Certain circumstances come together and lead to one action or another; or a thought comes to our mind to do something, and we do it. But the concurrence of circumstances does not come from us;  nor, obviously, is the thought to do something our own; somebody suggests it. Thus, in such cases, the origin or birth of the thought to do something cannot or should not be an object of self-praise. Yet how many actions are of this kind? If we examine them conscientiously, we shall find that they almost all start in this way. So we have nothing to boast of. (174)

This passage suggests the following argument: One cannot justifiably take credit for or take pride in anything (an action, a physical or mental attribute, etc.) unless one originates it "independently of anything else." But nothing is such that one originates it in sublime independence of all else. Therefore, one cannot justifiably take pride in anything. Here is a reason why pride is listed among the Seven Deadly Sins.

But does this amount to a metaphysical denial of the very existence of the self?  Not within Christian metaphysics. For that what is needed is the Buddhist assumption, crucial to the reasoning in the Anattalakkhana Sutta, that a self is an entity that has complete control over itself. Such a self could justifiably take pride in its actions and attributes. For it would be their fons et origo. So if one cannot justifiably take pride in any of one's actions or attributes, then one is not a self  in the sense in which this term is employed in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.  

In sum, both Buddha and Scupoli set the standard for selfhood very, and perhaps unattainably, high. Both claim that no one of us is a self for the reason than no one of us is in complete control of any of his actions or attributes. None of the things which one normally takes to be oneself or to belong to oneself (e.g., one's body, habits, brave decisions, brilliant insights, distinguished career, foolish mistakes, etc.) is such that one has originated it autonomously and independently.

Having set the standard for selfhood so high, Buddhism must deny that we are selves.  Christianity, however, is far less radical, holding as it does that we are selves all right, but ontologically derivative selves: we derive our being from the Creator, who is Being itself. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.) We are creatures of the one and only Absolute Self who brought us into being and sustains us in being. On Buddhism, nothing at all has 'self nature' in the eminent and plenary sense; on Christianity, one thing does, God. For Buddhism, there is no Absolute Self, there is in reality nothing like the Hindu Atman. For Christianity, there is an, or rather, the uniquely unique Absolute Self, namely, God. 

What about us? One thing is clear to both Buddhists and Christians: no one of us is identical to the Absolute Self.  For Buddhists, there is no Absolute Self, and for Christians, while there is an the Absolute Self, no one of us, no finite self, is or ever becomes identical to it, not even in the Beatific Vision.  If the visio beata involves a participation in the divine life, this does not involve a total assimilation: the finite self never loses its self-identity or individuality. In the Beatific Vision, creator-creature duality is mitigated, but never wholly eliminated.   

The main difference between Buddha and Scupoli is that the latter maintains that God gives us what we do not have under our control, our derivatively real selves. Thus for Scupoli, what we do not have from ourselves, we have from another, and so have. But for Buddha, what we do not have from ourselves, we do not have at all.

So in what sense does Scupoli embrace a 'no self' (anatta, anatman) doctrine? In the sense that in orthodox -- miniscule 'o' -- Christian metaphysics no one of us enjoys selfhood in the plenary sense of the term.

Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?

Retorsion (retortion) is the philosophical procedure whereby one attempts to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone who denies it. It is as old as Aristotle and has been put to use by philosophers as diverse as Transcendental Thomists and Ayn Rand and her followers. Retorsion is something like an ad hominem tu quoque except that the homo in question is everyman, indeed every rational being. Proofs by retorsion have the following form:

Proposition p is such that anyone who denies it falls into performative inconsistency; ergo, p is true.

Suppose a person asserts that there are no assertions.  That person falls into performative inconsistency:  the propositional content of the speech act is 'inconsistent' with the performance.  *There are no assertions* is the propositional content, or content, for short.  The speech act of asserting is in this case the performance.  The inconsistency is not strictly logical, which is why I employed scare quotes.  Strictly logical inconsistency/consistency obtains between propositions, and a performance such as asserting is not a proposition.  Performances belong to the category of events, not that of propositions. And yet it is clear that there is some sort of analog of inconsistency here, some sort or analog of 'contradiction.'  The content asserted is falsified by the act of asserting it.  The performance 'contradicts' the content.

 

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.

 

Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.

 

Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.

 

To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  

 

Now ask yourself which of the following is true:

 

(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.

 

(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.

 

A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.

 

(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 

 

(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts -- a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)

 

So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  

 

Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  

 

Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?

 

Combox open.

I Know My Limits

I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. 

(Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)

Ernst Mach and the Shabby Pedagogue: On Belief De Se

1. In The Analysis of Sensations (Dover, 1959, p. 4, n. 1) Ernst Mach (1838-1916) offers the following anecdote:

     Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was
     very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at
     the other end. 'What a shabby pedagogue that is, that has just
     entered,' thought I. It was myself; opposite me hung a large
     mirror. The physiognomy of my class, accordingly, was better known
     to me than my own.

When Mach got on the bus he saw himself, but not as himself. His first thought was one expressible by 'The man who just boarded is a shabby pedagogue.' 'The man who just boarded' referred to Mach. Only later did Mach realize that he was referring to himself, a thought that he might have expressed by saying, 'I am a shabby pedagogue.'

Clearly, the thought expressed by 'The man who just boarded is shabby' is distinct from the thought expressed by 'I am shabby.' After all, Mach had the first thought but not the second.  So they can't be the same thought.  And this despite the fact that the very same property is ascribed to the very same person by both sentences. The second thought is the content of a belief de se.  Such a belief is a belief about oneself as oneself.

One can have a belief about oneself without having a belief about oneself as oneself.

The difference emerges even more clearly if we alter the example slightly. Suppose Mach sees that the man who has just got on the bus has his fly open. He thinks to himself: The man who has just boarded has his fly open, a thought that leads to no action on Mach's part. But from the thought, I have my fly open, behavioral consequences ensue: Mach buttons his fly. Since the two thoughts have different behavioral consequences, they cannot be the same thought, despite the fact that they attribute the very same property to the very same person.

But if they attribute the same property to the same person, what exactly is the difference between the two thoughts?

Linguistically, the difference is that between a definite description ('the man who just boarded') and the first-person singular pronoun 'I.'   Since the referent (Frege's Bedeutung) is the same in both cases, namely Mach, one will be tempted to say that the difference is a difference in sense (Frege's Sinn) or mode of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweise). Mach refers to himself in two different ways, a third-person objective way via a definite description, and a first-person subjective way via the first-person singular pronoun.

If this is right, then although there are two different thoughts or propositions, one indexical and the other non-indexical, it might seem  that there need only be one fact in the world to serve as truth-maker for both, the fact of Mach's being shabby.  This is a non-indexical fact.  It might seem that reality is exhausted by non-indexical facts, and that there are no such indexical or perspectival facts as those expressed by 'I am shabby' or 'I am BV' or 'I am the man who just got on the bus.' Accordingly, indexicality is merely a subjective addition, a projection: it belongs to the world as it appears to us, not to the world as it is in itself, in reality.  On this approach, when BV says or thinks 'I,' he refers to BV  in the first-person way with the result that BV appears to BV under the guise of 'I'; but in reality there is no fact corresponding to 'I am BV.'

2. But is this right? There are billions of people in the world and one of them is me. Which one?  BV! But if the view sketched above is correct, then it is not an objective fact that one of these people is me. That BV exists is an objective fact, but not that BV is me.  BV has two ways of referring to himself but there is only one underlying objective fact.  Geoffrey Maddell strenuously disagrees:

     If I am to see the world in a certain way, then the fact that the
     world seen in this way is apprehended as such by me cannot be part
     of the content of that apprehension. If I impose a subjective grid
     on the world, then it is objectively the case that I do so. To put
     it bluntly, it is an objective fact about the world that one of the
     billions of people in it is me. Mind and Materialism, 1988, p.
     119.)

Maddell's point is that the first-person point of view is irreducibly real: it itself cannot be a subjective addition supplied from the first-person point of view. It makes sense to say that secondary qualities are projections, but it makes no sense to say that the first-person point of view is a projection. That which first makes possible subjective additions cannot itself be a subjective addition. That which is at the root of the very distinction between the for-us and the in-itself cannot be merely for-us. (Maddell might not approve of this last sentence of mine. It sounds a little 'Continental.')

Consider the phenomenal redness of a stop sign. It makes sense to say that this secondary quality does not belong to the sign itself in reality, but is instead a property the sign has only in relation to a   perceiver. In this sense, secondary qualities are subjective. But to say that subjectivity itself, first-person perspectivity itself, is a subjective projection is unintelligible. It cannot belong to mere   appearance, but must exist in reality. As Madell puts it, "Indexical  thought cannot be analysed as a certain 'mode of presentation', for the fact that reality is presented to me in some particular way cannot be part of the way in which it is presented." (p. 120)

3. Trouble for materialism. According to materialism, reality is exhausted by non-indexical physical facts. But we have just seen that  indexical thoughts are underpinned by indexical facts such as the fact of BV's being me. These facts are irreducibly real, but not physically real. Therefore, materialism is false: reality is not exhausted by  non-indexical physical facts.

Romantic Postscript

That most mysterious of all pronouns, the first-person singular, is the key, or one of them, to  the riddle of the universe. 

A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego

The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020)

.............................

Dear Bill,

You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this:

What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.

Of course, transcendental idealists will standardly respond something along the lines like:

The problem that you raise in this post only arises because you are asking the question, “What is the transcendental ego?” and expecting an answer which posits some kind of object or other;

but the problem is that the question asked does not "expect some kind of object", it simply asks whether the transcendental ego is something at all, whether it recedes [proceeds?] from pure nothingness, or not. Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" - as if pure logic could be thus confined.

Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out - viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?

Another great spot-on complaint of yours is that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of constitution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich -- and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else -- why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and thoroughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?

Posted by: Lukáš Novák | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 12:22 PM

Dear Lukáš,

It is indeed a pleasure to find you in agreement with me since you are one of the smartest people I know. I hope you and your family are well. I have fond memories of my time in Prague and the Czech Republic.

>>Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" - as if pure logic could be thus confined.<<

That's right. In Sartre, for example, consciousness is no-thing, thus nothing. A "wind blowing towards objects" but blowing from no direction and without any cause or ground. Hence the title *Being and Nothingness.* But of course consciousness is in some sense something since without it no objects would appear. So consciousness is both something and nothing -- which certainly looks like a contradiction.

Butchvarov, too, is tangled up in this problem.

Central to Heidegger's thinking is the ontological difference between das Sein und das Seiende (taken either collectively or distributively). But if Being is other than every being, and from the whole lot of them taken together, then Being is nonbeing, nichtseiend. So Sein und Nichts are the same, although not dialectically as in Hegel. But das Nichts ist kein nichtiges Nichts; it is not a nugatory nothing, but some sort of reality, some sort of positive Nothing -- which is structurally the same problem we find in Husserl, Sartre, and Butchvarov.

Also structurally similar is the notorious 'horse paradox' in Frege: "The concept HORSE is not a concept."

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 01:32 PM

Dr. Novak:

>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out - viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?<<

Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer. Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.

If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part of the world."

I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry and other positive sciences.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:09 PM

>>Another great spot-on your complaint that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of constitution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich -- and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else -- why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and thoroughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?<<

You raise a good objection. For example, when Husserl makes a claim about outer perception, that it is intentional, presumptive, that it presents its object directly without images or epistemic intermediaries, etc., he means these claims to be eidetic not factual. He aims to make claims that are true even if there are no cases of outer perception. He is concerned with the essence of perception, the essence of memory, of imagination, etc. Now these essences and the propositions about them are ideal objects that cannot depend on factical subjectivity for their Seinsinn.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:49 PM

Dr. Novak by e-mail (27 January 2021):

I take also this opportunity to finally respond to your reactions to my

comment on your post

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2020/10/why-did-i-move-away-from-phenomenology.html

-- I apologize I did not manage to do so in time -- you know, I am always behind my schedule with my work...

 

L.N.:

>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it

>>rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way

>>out - viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that

>>"transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to

>>noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just

>>ordinary parts of the world?<<

 

B.V.:

> Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer.

> Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by

> citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all

> existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent

> transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the

> life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the

> transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as

> well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.

>

>If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part

>of the world."

 

LN: Obviously, this hinges on the meaning of "ordinary". I certainly don't

propose reducing cognition and appetition to something merely material

or sub-animal. But why cannot genuine, unreduced cognition and

appetition be part of the reality just as pebbles of quartz are?

 

I agree that soul is a subject of cognitions and appearances and

appetitions. But why "transcendental"? Why must it be pushed out of

the picture, so to speak? When I say "I cognize myself", isn't the "I"

both the real, intramundane subject who does the cognizing, and the

object of this cognizing?

 

BV: >I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do

>not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our

>intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for

>naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even

>sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry

>and other positive sciences.

 

LN: Of course I agree with all that. By "noetic realism" I mean that

cognition is (i) non-representationalist (i.e., terminating at reality

itself, not at some representations of reality -- against Locke etc.);

and (ii) receptive, i.e., assimilative to, and measured by, the

object, not vice versa (against all sorts of idealism). Note that (i)

does not imply that cognition cannot err, nor does it exclude the

existence of mental representations as of that _by means of which_

(as opposed to _that which_) we cognize. And it also does not exclude

that reality-qua-cognized may in certain respects differ from

reality-qua-out-there -- but it is one and the same reality which is

both out there and cognized.

 

I would say we are indeed parts of the material world (we are bodies),

but not "just parts" of it. We are not mere bodies, but spirited

bodies. But a spirited body is a body, nevertheless. I am not sure if

this dual nature of man can be analyzed in hylomorphic terms, but I

insist with P.F.Strawson that both bodily and mental predicates are

to be ascribed to one and the same subject (and unlike Strawson, I

take this to be a feature of reality, not just of our conceptual

scheme).

 

Best regards,

 

Lukas

 

BV to LN (28 January 2021): For you, the notion of a transcendental subject is incoherent and should be simply dropped. There is no genuine problem here as I think there is. For you, Husserl took a wrong turn, the transcendental turn, and went down a false path.   For you, the ultimate subject of conscious states is an "ordinary part of the world." But you don't mean this materialistically or physicalistically. You admit the "dual nature of man." Man is an animal, but not just an animal: he is also a spirit.  You are rightly skeptical of hylomorphic dualism. Are you then a substance dualist? It seems not since you say that "both bodily and mental predicates are to be ascribed to one and the same subject."  But what is this subject? Is it the body in nature?  The body is a material thing and the body, qua material, cannot think.  My brain doesn't think any more than my eye glasses see.   The latter are instruments of vision, the former an instrument of thought.  The brain cannot be the ultimate subject of experience.  The same goes for each of my body parts and for my body as a whole. I don't think with my liver or feel with my heart, which is just a pump made out of meat.  The liver is just a filter made of meat.  

 

Could the psyche be the ultimate ego?  No, it is an object of introspection not the subject that introspects. Similarly for the psychophysical complex. It is not the ultimate subject of experience.   You see where I am going with this. I am regressing to the ultimate condition of anything appearing. This ultimate condition is not to be found among the objects of consciousness. We say it is 'transcendental' though not in the Aristotelian-scholastic sense.   Whether or not it is an ego is a further question; but let's assume  that it is. 

 

I have just motivated  -- in a sketchy way --  the introduction of the transcendental ego.   You don't accept this. You will say that one and the same intramundane subject is both cognizer and cognized.  So when I inspect my body, is my body inspecting my body, or some part of my body inspecting some other part of my body?  What part of the body has the power to do this?  Is my hand sensing the soles of my feet? No, I am sensing in tactile fashion the soles of my feet by the instrumentality of a hand.  Is this I a metaphysical self?  If it is, how can it be identical to the physical body?

 

You are trying to think of subjectivity in an objective/objectivistic/objectifying way like a good Aristotelian. But this approach seems as problematic as Husserl's transcendental idealism.

Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure

Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry:

[Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated] human body. It is simply this empirical ego considered from the point of view of its being a dative of disclosure, a mihi to whom the world is disclosed.

I don't consider this helpful. To be blunt, I consider it confused.

The claim seems to be that the transcendental ego is just the empirical ego when the latter is considered as that to which the world and the objects in it appear, including that very special object which  is one's animated body.  This gives rise to the question: Who is doing the considering?  That is, who is it by whose consideration the empirical ego acquires the property of being the dative of disclosure?

It has to be me.  But it cannot be me qua object, since qua object I am not the dative, but the accusative of disclosure.  I am one of the objects that appears. So it has to be me qua subject, qua dative but not accusative of disclosure.  And let us be clear that there cannot be a dative without a nominative. There cannot be an appearing-to that is not an appearing-to something.  There could, however, be an appearing that is wholly non-relational: things just appear, are revealed, manifest themselves, but not to a subject.* But if there is an appearing-to, then there must be that to which the appearance appears. No dative without a nominative.  Either non-relational appearing or we go 'whole hog' with Husserl: ego-cogito-cogitata qua cogitata.

From this is follows that the duality self as subject-self as object is (a) inexpungeable, and (b) located within the ego.  The duality cannot be collapsed into an abstract unity, nor can the subjectivity of the subject be referred to someone or something external to the ego. I am a subject intrinsically, not relationally, not in virtue of being considered to be a subject. That is to say: the transcendentality of the ego cannot accrue to it ab extra by the the empirical ego's consideration of itself as transcendental.  Hysteron proteron! This puts the cart before the horse:**  it is because I am a transcendental ego that I can apperceive myself as a human being in nature.  As a human being, I simply lack the power to function transcendentally, to execute acts including acts of apperception. 

Of course, there cannot be two egos. The empirical ego is an ego only by analogy (equivocation?)  The true ego is the transcendental ego.  I am being faithful to Husserl here.

So I don't see that Sokolowski, or rather Sokolowski as presented by Nemes, contributes anything to the solution of the problem I posed in my long post.

________________

*This, I take it, is Heidegger's  notion of phenomenon which differs markedly from Husserl's.

**Joke: A philosopher took up residence in a bordello, thinking to enlighten the 'sex workers.' He soon left disillusioned after he found that he could not put Descartes before the whores.

Ideals and Non-Attachment

Self-mastery, you say, is the highest mastery. You are attached to this ideal and you live for the most part in accordance with it. But on occasion you stumble and fall. You lose your temper, overeat, or succumb to lust. And then you feel disgust with yourself. The failure hurts your ego. It diminishes your sense of distinction, which is what the ego is. The pain of moral failure reveals attachment to an ideal and a self-image. Is it the ideal you honor or your self-image? The solution is not to abandon  the ideal,  but to pursue it with detachment from the outcome, the outcome being either your success or your failure in meeting its demand.

Non-attachment is an ideal too. You can identify with it and become attached to it to the detriment of your non-attachment. But if I am not my property, pelf, and productions, nor my body, nor my transient states of mind, how could I be my ideals? They too are external.  If I identify  with the ideal of non-attachment, then I am attached to it, and to that extent conflate my (true) self with my (worldly) ego. 'My' ideals are not me. I don't own them or control them. It would be truer to say that they own me and control me. They are not ex-pressions of any true self I may have. They are not my innermost identity; I acquire an objective, a worldly identity by identifying with them. 

So subtle are the dialectics of the self and the demands of the moral life.

The Riddle of the Self

Jacques comments:

I like your reply to the reader who asked about the existence of the self.  All good points!  I wonder what you think about the following different response to people like Harris (or Hume)...  It seems to me that they just don't adequately support their claim that no self can be known or discovered or experienced.  A few thoughts:

(1) It just might be true that the self isn't found "when looked for in a more rigorous way", if meditation (or whatever) is a rigorous way of looking for it.  But does that support the conclusion that we don't experience the self in some other way--for example, without "rigorously" looking for it?  Phenomenologically, it seems to me that I'm aware of myself most of the time.  I can feel "self-conscious", for example, if I'm uncomfortable or worried how other people perceive me.  At other times, when I'm lost in the moment, I'm less aware of myself.  Why doesn't this kind of phenomenological fact (or seeming fact) count as evidence that there is such a thing?

BV: It is an interesting question whether the experience of self-consciousness you describe is evidence against the claim made by Sartre, Butchvarov, et al. that that there is no self or subject who is conscious. It is not obvious to me that it is. Suppose I feel self-conscious in a social situation. I am perhaps reading a paper before a large group of people I do not know.  Maybe it's part of a job interview! My one chance at securing a tenure-track position! A latter-day Humean might offer the following description.  There is in the speaker awareness of: the audience, the expressions on their faces, the body and sensations in the body such as dryness in the mouth and sweat forming on the forehead, a bit of queasiness in the stomach, the less-than-confident sound of one's voice, feelings of anxiety, nervousness, self-doubt, and so on. There needn't be a self that is aware of all this physical and mental data.  There is just (subject-less) awareness of it.

It is important to bear in mind that when a philosopher asks about the existence of the self, he is not asking about his possessions or his body or any part thereof, or his memories or any introspectible contents. He is not asking about what ordinary people identify as themselves. People identify themselves with the damndest things, their cars, their Zip codes, their bodies. For all of that is 'on the side of the object.' What he is asking is whether there is a subject distinct from all of that, distinct from the body and from the empirical psyche.

A much stronger objection to the Humean invokes the thesis of Brentano that every primary intentional awareness is accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of that very awareness. This is essentially wat Sartre later described as the pre-reflective cogito.  Kant famously maintained that the 'I think' must be able to accompany all of my representations.  Brentano and Sartre maintain that the 'I think' does accompany all of my representings, or better, awarenesses -- it is just that the 'I think' needn't be an act of explicit reflection.

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness.  I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat.  How does the Humean account for the awareness of being aware? He can say of the primary straightforward awareness that it is a subjectless awareness of a phenomenal object.  But he can't say the same of the secondary awareness. For it is not a phenomenal object over against the awareness of it.  It is not something presented but a state of affairs that involves me as subject.

'I am aware of a cat' can perhaps be rewritten subjectlessly  as 'There is awareness of a cat.' But 'I am aware of being aware of a cat' cannot be subjectlessly rewritten as 'There is awareness of awareness of a cat.' For the second sentence could be true without the first being true. Suppose there is in Tom visual awareness of a cat, but no awareness of awareness, and in God awareness of Tom's awareness, but no visual awareness of a cat.  The point here is that the primary and secondary awarenesses need to form a synchronic unity in one and the same subject. 

(2) Why shouldn't we allow that the self might be the kind of thing that "rigorous" examination will tend to obscure.  There are lots of things I can perceive, somehow or at some times, but which I can't perceive or can't easily perceive when I "rigorously" consciously attend to them.  If I consciously focus my attention on the question of what "truth" means I can easily get confused.  I might begin to doubt whether I'm really aware of truth, or the concept of truth.  It doesn't follow that I'm not somehow aware of truth at other times, e.g., when wondering whether what X said about Trump is really true.

BV: This is a line of thought worth developing. You mention truth. Time is another example. What is time?  Don't ask me, and I know.  Ask me, and I don't know. (Augustine).  We all have a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical understanding of what time is, but when we attempt an analysis or a theory we get tangled up.

One famous theory of time, McTaggart's, issues in the conclusion that time is unreal.  This is the analog of those theories of the self that deny that there is a self.  Another famous theory of time, the B-theory of D. H. Mellor and others, denies temporal passage, reducing (real) time to the static ordering of events by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with).  This is the analog of theories of the self like that of Hume's that do not outright deny the self, but reduce it to a bundle of impressions or of other items.

You might also develop your thought by exploring the the focus-fringe relation.  Focal awareness seems to presuppose fringe awareness.  What is on the fringe of my awareness can become my focus, but only if what was before at the focus moves to the fringe. Perhaps the self is like a permanent fringe that cannot be brought into focus, but must be there for anything to be brought into focus.  If so, that would explain why one cannot isolate the self as an object among objects. The notion of 'horizon' in Husserl and Heidegger is relevant here.

(3) They don't really justify the assumption that the kind of entity that they claim not to discover in their "rigorous" examination should be identified with the self.  Or the characterization is too vague to decide whether we do or don't discover this thing.  The vague idea of "an experiencer distinct from the flow of experience", for example.  In some sense, I'm pretty sure that I do know this kind of entity from first-hand experience:  right now I seem to be aware of the sensations and thoughts I'm having, and also something (i.e., me, my-self) that is the (distinct) subject of these experiences.  Presumably they'd say this isn't my experience, or else that they don't mean to deny that I can have that experience but rather some other kind of experience.  But then either their position seems false or it's just not clear what they're talking about.

BV: You are putting your finger on an important issue.  You can't search for a thing unless you have an idea of what you are  searching for. You won't be able to find my lost cygnet unless you know what a cygnet is.  One will miss the self -- assuming there is one -- if one searches for it under a description it cannot satisfy. Case in point:

Here are the words of Buddha according to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, his second discourse, the Sermon on the Mark of Not-Self:

 
     The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self,
     this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible
     (to say) with regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body
     be not thus.' But precisely because the body is not self, the body
     lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with
     regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.'


Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one's self, not one's own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one's self would have to be something over which one would have complete control.  The tacit premise is that the self is  something wholly active and spontaneous and self-regulating.  It is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control.  To suffer is to be passive.  An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent.  (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.)   

So if you set the bar really high, it will turn out that nothing we encounter in experience is a self or has self-nature. If so, we should discard, not the self, but the conception no actual self can instantiate.

David Hume too searches for the self under a description it cannot satisfy.  You know the famous passage from the Treatise wherein he speaks of entering most intimately into himself only to stumble upon nothing but perceptions. Hume reports,  "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." (Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge, 1978, p. 252.)

Well, if he is looking for a self that is bare of all perceptions (taking 'perception' broadly to subsume all mental states or conscious experiences), then it is no surprise that he finds nothing.  It could be like this: the self is a substance (an endurant, not a perdurant) that remains numerically self-same over time but is always in some state or other.  It would then be distinct from each of its states, and from all of them taken collectively, but also necessarily such that it cannot exist without being in some state or other.

And if that is so, then, when I am in a self-presenting state such as that of being euphoric, I am directly aware of my self as being in that state.  We may grant Hume that we cannot be aware of the self as an item apart from its states, but that is consistent with being aware of the self in and through its states. 

(4) I'd admit that the deep and detailed nature of this (seemingly) distinct entity is mysterious.  But then it seems that they're wrongly assuming that having experience or knowledge of X requires having experience or knowledge of X sufficient for some kind of exhaustive and perfect understanding of X.  I know about other people, and I experience them, without knowing everything about them (or what the ultimate nature of a person is, etc).  Harris seems to be saying merely that the precise character of his self is elusive, hard to individuate or define, at least while he's meditating.  I don't understand why that phenomenological fact is supposed to warrant the conclusion that he's found nothing of the kind.  Maybe I haven't meditated properly but, in my experience, I take myself to be always dimly aware of just that kind of thing.  But it's in the corner of the mind's eye, so to speak.

I agree that the self is mysterious and indeed beyond the reach of naturalistic understanding.

Is There a Self? A Reader Requests Reassurance

A reader reports that he has recently gone through "a season of depression and extreme anxiety" and has come to doubt what he hitherto believed to be true, namely that there is a self.  He now fears that Sam Harris may be right in the following passage I quote in Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion:

It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

What the reader wants from me are reasons in support of his belief that there is a self in the teeth of Harris' claim that the self is a cognitive illusion. Whether or not I can strictly refute the 'No Self' view, I can show that it is not rationally compelling and that one can very reasonably deny it. Here we go.

An Operator-Shift Fallacy

1) The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Harris looks to be guilty of an operator-shift fallacy. The following is a non sequitur:

a) It is not the case that I find X

ergo

b) I find that it is not the case that there is X.

2) So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

A Transcendental Argument

3) What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even if the self cannot be experienced as a separate object alongside the usual objects of introspection/reflection.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

This is a sort of transcendental argument for the self. We start with a plain fact, namely, that a search is going on, a search for the referent of 'I' given that I am not identical to my property, my body, or any introspectible contents. We then ask: what makes it possible for this search to proceed? We conclude that there must be something that is searching, and what might that be? Well, me! I am searching.  The I, ego, self is not exhausted by its objectifiable features.

A Dogmatic Assumption

It is simply false to say what Harris says, namely, that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?  My point is that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

The Diachronic Unity of Consciousness

4) There are also important considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

The above blend of phenomenological and dialectical considerations suffices to ensure at least a standoff with Harris and other latter-day Buddhists/Humeans. 

Four Types of Ontological Egalitarianism

There are egalitarians in ontology as there are in political theory.

Herewith, four types of ontological egalitarianism: egological, spatial, temporal, and modal.

Egological egalitarianism is the view  there is a plurality of equally real selves.  I take it we are all egological egalitarians in sane moments. I'll assume that no one reading this thinks, solipsistically, that he alone is real and that others, if they exist at all, exist only as merely intentional objects for him. The problem of Other Minds may concern us, but that is an epistemological problem, one that presupposes that there are other minds/selves. On ontological egalitarianism, then, no self enjoys ontological privilege.

Spatial egalitarianism is the that there is a plurality of equally real places.  Places other than here are just as real as the place picked out by a speaker's use of 'here.'  I take it we are all spatial egalitarians.  No one, not even a Manhattanite, thinks that the place where he is is the only real place.  Here is real but so is yonder.  No place enjoys ontological privilege. All places are equal. 

Temporal egalitarianism is the view that there is a plurality of equally real times.  Times other than the present time are just as real as the present time. No time enjoys ontological privilege, which implies that there is nothing ontologically special about the present time. All times are equal. No time is present, period.  This is called the B-theory of time. Here is a fuller explanation.

Modal egalitarianism is the view that there is a plurality of equally real possibilities.  Possibilities other than those that are actual are just as real as those that are actual. It is plausible to think of possibilities as coming in maximal or 'world-sized' packages.  Call them possible worlds.  On modal egalitarianism, then, all possible worlds are equally real.  No world enjoys ontological privilege.  Our world, the world we take to be actual, is not absolutely actual; it is merely actual for us, or rather, actual at itself.  But that is true of every world: each is actual at itself. No world is actual, period.  In respect of actuality, all possible worlds are equal. 

What is curious about these four types of ontological egalitarianism is that, while the first two are about as close to common sense as one is likely to get, the second two are not.  Indeed, the fourth will strike most people as crazy. Was David Lewis crazy?  I don't know, but I hear he was a bad driver. 

Related: Philosophers as Bad Drivers?

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Lecturer on Personal Identity Denied Honorarium

The members of the philosophy department were so convinced by the lecturer's case against diachronic personal identity that they refused to pay him his honorarium on the ground that the potential recipient could not be the same person as the lecturer. This from a piece by Stanley Hauerwas:

It is by no means clear to me that I am the same person who wrote Hannah's Child. Although philosophically I have a stronger sense of personal identity than Daniel Dennett, who after having given a lecture to a department of philosophy on personal identity, was not given his honorarium. The department refused to give him his honorarium because, given Dennett's arguments about personal identity, or lack thereof, the department was not confident that the person who had delivered the lecture would be the same person who would receive the honorarium.

That has to be a joke, right?  It sounds like the sort of tall tale that Dennett would tell. 

My understanding of character, which at least promises more continuity in our lives than Dennett thinks he can claim, does not let me assume that I am the same person who wrote Hannah's Child. I cannot be confident I am the same person because the person who wrote Hannah's Child no doubt was changed by having done so. While I'm unable to state what I learned by writing the book, I can at least acknowledge that I must have been changed by having done so.

Hauerwas is confusing numerical and qualitative identity. Yes, you have been changed by writing your book.  No doubt about it.  Does it follow that you are a numerically different person than the one who wrote the book?  Of course not.  What follows is merely that you are qualitatively different, different in respect of some properties or qualities.

Perhaps there is no strict diachronic personal identity.  This cannot be demonstrated, however, from the trivial observation that people change property-wise over time.  For that is consistent with strict diachronic identity.

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On the Separation and Attachment of Soul and Body

I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back.  The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body."  The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom  a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion.  But his colorful phraseology got me thinking. 

The words 'soul' and 'spirit' carry a cargo of both religious and substance-dualist connotations.  And that is the way I will use them.  The soul is that in us which thinks in the broad Cartesian sense of 'think.'  it is the subject of consciousness and self-consciousness and moral sense (conscience).  It is the thinker of our thoughts and the agent of our actions.  It is the ultimate reference of the first person singular pronoun 'I' in its indexical use.   But I must add that the soul is these things construed as capable of independent existence, as having not only an immaterial nature, but also an immaterial nature capable of existing on its own apart from these gross physical bodies with which we are all too familiar.  So 'soul' is a theoretical term; it is not datanic or theory-neutral.  'Consciousness,' by contrast, is theory neutral.  If you deny that there are souls, you will be forgiven, and you may even be right.  If you deny that there is consciousness, however, then you are either a sophist, a lunatic, or an eliminativist, which is to say, a lunatic.  Sophists and lunatics are not to be debated; they are to be 'shown the door.'

A substance, among other things, is an entity metaphysically capable of independent existence.  The soul is a substance.  It does not require some other thing in which to exist. (Nulla res indiget ad existendum.) So it is capable of independent existence.  We encounter it as 'attached' to the body, but it can 'separate' from the body.  The question is what these words mean in this context.  The problem is to ascribe some coherent sense to them.  What is the nature of this strange attachment?

1. Only physical things can be physically separated and physically attached. (The toenail from the toe; the stamp to the envelope; the spark plug from the cylinder; the yolk from the white, etc.) The soul is not a physical thing; ergo, souls cannot be physically separated from or attached to anything.  So in this context we are not to take 'separation' and 'attachment' in any physical or material sense, whether gross or subtle.  So don't think of ghosts or spooks floating out of gross bodies.  Spook-stuff is still stuff, while what we are talking about now is not 'stuffy' at all.

2.  It follows from this that every physical model is inadequate and just as, or more, misleading than helpful.  The soul is not like the pilot in the ship, the man in his house, the oyster in the shell, the prisoner in his cell.  These analogies may capture certain aspects of the soul-body relation, but they occlude others so that on balance they are of little use.  But they are of some use.  The morally sensitive, for example, experience a tension between their higher nature and their animal inclinations.  There is more to the moral life than a struggle against the lusts of the flesh, but that is part of it.  Thus the resonance of the Socratic image of the body as the prison-house of the soul.

3.  The soul-body relation cannot literally be an instance of a physical relation, nor could it be an instance of a logical or mathematical or mereological or set-theoretical relation.  We can lump these last four together under the rubric 'abstract relations.' Presumably the soul-body relation is sui generis.  It's its own thing.  Just as it would be absurd to say that entailment is an instance of a physical relation, it is absurd to suppose that soul-body is an instance of a physical or a logico-mathematical relation.  The soul is neither a physical entity nor an abstract entity.

4.  It seems to follow that if the the soul-body relation is sui generis, then there can be no model for it borrowed from some more familiar realm.  The relation can only be understood in 'soulic,' or as I will say, spiritual terms.  It can only be understood in its own terms. So let's consider mental or spiritual attachment.   I am attached to my cat in the sense that, were he to die, I would grieve.  Clearly, this is not a physical relation.  Whether he is on my lap or far away, the attachment is the same.  Spiritual attachment is consistent with physical separation.  And spiritual non-attachment (spiritual separation) is consistent with physical proximity and indeed contact. 

We allow ourselves to become attached to all sorts of things, people, and ideas, especially our own ideas.  Attachments wax and wane.  Many are foolish and even delusional.  We become attached to what cannot last as if it will last forever.  We become attached to what has no value.  We have trouble apportioning our degree of attachment to the reality and value of attachment's object.  As  has been appreciated in many religions and wisdom traditions, much of our misery arises from desire and attachment to the objects of desire.  For Pali Buddhism it is desire as such that is the problem; on more moderate views inordinate and misdirected desire.  We are also capable of non-attachment or detachment, and this has been recommended in different ways and to different degrees by the religions and the wisdom traditions.  There can be no doubt that non-attachment is a major component in wisdom. 

5. None of this attaching and detaching would be possible without intentionality.  The spiritual self, by virtue of its intentionality, flees itself and loses itself among the objects of its attachment.  Chief among these is the mundane self: the body, the personality, their pasts, and the myriad of objects that one takes to be one's own.  My car, my house, my wife, my children, my brilliant insights . . . .  And now I come to my speculation.  The soul attaches itself to this body here in a manner similar to the way it attaches itself to everything else to which it attaches itself.  So attaching itself, my soul makes this body here my body.  I come to  'inhabit' this body here, thereby making it my body, by my having chosen this body as the material locus of my subjectivity, as the vehicle of my trajectory through space-time.  But when"  Where?   How?  I chose this fall into time?

I am telling a Platonic story.  I am penning yet another footnote to Plato.  Who can believe it?  Well, consider the alternatives!  You are not your body and yet you are attached to it.  What is your theory as to the nature of this attachment?  I know what you will say.  And I will have no trouble poking holes in it.

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Wittgenstein and Butchvarov on the Self

This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633) 

Wittgenstein

As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world.  "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631)  The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book."  The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.

But why not?  Because it doesn't exist, or because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience?  It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."  So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world. His thesis is not eliminativist, but identitarian.

From the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist.  If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.

As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field.  If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes, a point on which I 'dilate' in detail in the earlier entry.

The analogy is clear to me.  Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world.  Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)  

Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case."  There is nothing outside it.  And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world.  Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self  and that it is the limit of world.  He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.

What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego.  The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher.  He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them.  According to P. M. S. Hacker,

Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant.  It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)

Spot on.

Butchvarov

Now to Butchvarov.  He writes that his picture and Wittgenstein's share "the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus of subjectivism in all its forms." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 235)  A few pages earlier we read, "Hume in effect denied that there is what Wittgenstein was to call 'the philosophical self' or 'the metaphysical subject'." (226)

Here is where I disagree.    While it is certainly true that both Hume and Wittgenstein reject the substantial self of Descartes and of the pre-Critical rational psychologists,  Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject.  Nor should he, even if he accepts Hume's argument from the non-appearance of the self.  For the metaphysical self, as the limit of the world, is not an object in the world and so cannot be expected to appear in the world.  Its non-appearance is no argument against it.

That Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject is also clear from Wittgenstein's claim at 5.641 that "there is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way" without, I may add, lapsing into a physiological or naturalistic way of talking about it.  He goes on to reiterate that the "philosophical self" is not the human body or the human soul, and therefore no part of the world.  It is the "metaphysical subject," the limit of the world.  

What I am maintaining, then, in apparent  contradiction to Butchvarov, is that, while Wittgenstein rejects the substantial ego of Descartes, he does not reject "the metaphysical subject" or "the philosophical self." 

A Dilemma?

There is a  serious substantive issue here, however, one that may tell against Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism. (See article referenced below.)

Why call this philosophical self or metaphysical subject a self if it only a limit?  Can a limit be conscious of anything?  Why should the self be a philosophical as opposed to a psychological or neurophysiological topic?  How does the self get into philosophy? Must the self get into philosophy for antirealism to get off the ground?     "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'." (5.641)  This harks back to the opening antirealist sentence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The world is my representation."  Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.  The world is my world because, tautologically, the only world for me is my world.  The only world for me as subject is the world as object.  As Butchvarov puts it, though without reference to Schopenhauer, "The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us." (231)  This is the gist of what the great pessimist says on the first page of WWR.  (Whether it is indeed a tautology needs to be carefully thought through.  Or rather, whether it can be both a tautology and a statement of antirealism needs to be thought through.  I don't think it can be both as I will argue in a moment.) 

Now the possessive pronoun 'my' is parasitic upon the the first-person pronoun 'I' which refers to the self. So my world is the the world thinkable and cognizable by me, by the I which is no more in the 'consciousness field,' the world of objects, than the seeing eye is in the visual field.  How can my world be mine without this transcendental I?  And if you send the transcendental I packing, what is left of antirealism?

Are we headed for a dilemma?  It seems we are.  

1. Either (a) antirealism boils down to the tautological thesis that "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) or (b) it does not.  Please note that the quoted thesis is indeed a tautology.  But it is a further question whether it can be identified with a nonvacuous thesis of antirealism. (And surely antirealism must be nonvacuous to be worthy of discussion.)  While it is a tautology that the only cats I see are the cats I see, this is consistent with both the realist thesis that cats exist independently of anyone's seeing and the antirealist thesis that their existence is just the indefinite identifiability of cat-noemata by a perceiver.

2. If (a), then antirealism 'says nothing' and does not exclude realism.  It is a vacuous thesis.  For example, it does not exclude a representational realism according to which there is a world that exists in itself, a world that includes beings like us who represent the world in various ways more or less adequately and whose representations are representations of what, in itself, is not a representation.

3. If (b), and  antirealism is to have any non-tautological 'bite,' it must imply that the world is in some respect dependent on a self or selves other than it.  But then the "philosophical self" or "metaphysical subject" cannot be either a mere limit of the world as Wittgenstein says or nonexistent as Butchvarov implies.  It must be a part of the world.  But this leaves us with the Paradox of Antirealism.  For it conflicts with what Butchvarov considers "self-evident," namely, that in the context of the realism-antirealism debate, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection of brains), of that world." (231)

Therefore

4. Antirealism is either vacuous or incoherent.  It is vacuous if a tautology.  For then it cannot exclude realism.  It is incoherent if not a tautology. For then it succumbs to the Paradox of Antirealism.

What Butchvarov wants is a "metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric." (231)  It is not clear to me that he can have both antirealism and non-anthropocentrism.  Antirealism cannot get off the ground as a substantive, non-tautological thesis in metaphysics without a self or selves on which the world depends (in some respects, not necessarily all).  But the price for that is anthropocentrism in Butchvarov's broad use of that term.  He opposes (rightly!) making the world dependent on physical proper parts thereof, but also making it dependent on purely mental/spiritual proper parts and presumably also a divine proper part  

One can of course attenuate the subject, retreating from brain to psyche, to transcendental ego, to limit of the world, to a self that shrinks to a point without extension (5.64), to a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects which is, as Sartre says, nothing -- but at the limit of this attenuation one arrives at something so thin  and next-to-nothing as to be incapable of supporting a robust antirealism. 

Questions for Professor Butchvarov

1. Do you agree with me that, while Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian-type ego that Hume rejects, he does not reject what he calls "the metaphysical subject" and "the philosophical self"?

2. Do you agree with me that, for Wittgenstein, the metaphysical subject construed as limit of the world, exists, is not nothing?

3. Do you agree with me that, while "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) is plainly a tautology, it is a further question whether this tautology is the thesis of antirealism that is debated by philosophers?  (As opposed to a thesis of antirealism that you have arbitrarily stipulated.)

4.  Do you agree with me that the above quoted tautology is logically consistent with both realism and antirealism?

5.  Do you agree that rather than solving the Paradox of Antirealism, you dissolve it by eliminating the subject of consciousness entirely? 

6.  Suppose I grant you that there are no egos, no acts, and that consciousness-of is non-relational along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness.  Will you grant me that the distinction -- the 'Transcendental Difference' if you will -- between subjectless consciousness-of and objects is ineliminable and undeniable?

7.  If you grant me that, will you grant me that the non-relational appearing of objects does not itself appear?

8.  If you grant what I want you to grant in (7) will you grant that something can be real without appearing, without 'showing up' phenomenologically?

9.  If you grant me what I want you to grant in (8) will you grant that, if something can be real without appearing, that the transcendental ego and acts can also be real without appearing?

To put it another way, if you hold that there are no egos and acts on the ground that they do not appear, must you not also maintain that there is no nonrelational consciousness-of on the ground that it does not appear?

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Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

The Unlimited Obfuscation of Some Continental Writers

The Metaphysical Subject :<i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i> 5.63

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The Metaphysical Subject :Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.63

 

I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field.  I can of course see my eyes via a mirror.  But these are seen eyes, not seeing eyes.  The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.

That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes.  They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc.  The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex -- the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing?  In the pupil?  In the retina?  In the optic nerve?  Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain?  In the visual cortex?Where exactly?  Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system?  But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye.  And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items?  But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time?  And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything?  If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point:  the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able.  It is not an object of actual or possible experience.  It is not in the world.  It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye or a relation in which the eye stands or an activity of the eye.  The same goes for the whole visual system.  And yet there is seeing.  There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.  

Who or what does the seeing?  What is the subject of visual consciousness?  Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye?  No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something.  No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."*   We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."  

But then who or what is this I?  It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field.  Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness.  It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.

So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein.  There is a subject, but it is not in the world.  So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world.  'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being.  (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)

But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world.  This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world.  "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1)  It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world.  So all the self can be is the limit of the world.

We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts.  The world is a totality of things or facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively.  So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension).  So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world  as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.  

This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63)

I take it that Tractatus 5.63  is the central inspiration behind Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism which, in an earlier entry, I formulated as follows:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

The world cannot depend on me if I am a (proper) part of the world.  But if "I am my world," then the problem would seem to dissolve.  That, very roughly, is Butchvarov's solution.

The solution implies that the philosophical as opposed to the ordinary indexical uses of  the first-person singular pronoun, those uses that figure into the Augustinian Si fallor sum, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, the Kantian Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vortsellungen begleiten koennen, the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, and the debate about realism and antirealism are really impersonal, despite what Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl think.  For then the philosophical uses of 'I' refer to the world-as-totality and not to a person or to something at the metaphysical core of a person such as a noumenal self.

This notion that the philosophical uses of the personal pronoun 'I' are really impersonal is highly problematic, a point I will come back to.

_____________________

*People do say things like: "My brain said, 'Stay away from her,' but my little head said, 'Go for it, man!'"  Such talk is of course nonsense if taken literally. 

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Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS:  How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too.  What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity.  For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung)  humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.'   For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.   For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical egos somehow associated with human beings.  It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites.  It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object.   Consciousness is subject-less.  So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects.  It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.  

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I)  with the following triadic Cartesian shema:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum 

Subject --------------------> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely trhe noema of that very noesis.  Got that?)

Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):

------------------------------->objects.

For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, other than every object, not in the world, and thus not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species.  The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects.  (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")

Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.

Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' inasmuch as it is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone.  It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.'  Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear.  This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's merely apparent.  It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism.  It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution.

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity? 

Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Contra Husserl

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes,  one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing  in itself independently of consciousness.    Everything objective succumbs to the epoche.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.  

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing.  He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

1.  Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.

2.  Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.

3.  Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness. 

4.  Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)

5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.

6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)

7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.

8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.

9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.

10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to.  For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things.  Butchvarov's  theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:  "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633)  There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.

11. Husserl and  Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way."  (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.

12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego.  Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness.  And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'

There is much more to be said, later.  It is Saturday night and time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and cue up some oldies. 

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

In his highly  original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015)  Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics.  These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward a long review article I have been commissioned to write for a European journal.

Anthropocentrism in Metaphysics

In metaphysics, anthropocentrism assumes the form of antirealism. Antirealism is the view that the world, insofar as it is knowable, depends on us and our cognitive capacities. (6) Bishop Berkeley aside, metaphysical antirealism has its source and model in Kant's transcendental idealism. Contemporary antirealism is “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189) On Butchvarov's view there can be no return to a pre-Critical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. (225) But surely the world cannot depend on us if 'us' refers to human animals. Butchvarov's task, then, is to develop a version of metaphysical antirealism that is free of anthropocentrism. A central question is whether the characteristic antirealist thesis that the world depends on us and our cognitive capacities can be upheld without 'us' being understood in an anthropocentric way. To answer this question is to resolve the Paradox of Antirealism (PA), a paradox that I would maintain is endemic to every form of transcendental philosophy from Kant, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Butchvarov:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

Some will reject the paradox by rejecting its first limb.  But that would be to reject antirealism.  It would be to dissolve the problem rather than solve it.  Let's see if Butchvarov can solve the paradox while upholding antirealism.  But what version of antirealism does Butchvarov espouse?

Butchvarov's Metaphysical Antirealism

Metaphysical antirealism is so-called to distinguish it from antirealism in ethics and in epistemology. It is the view that “The world insofar as it is knowable by us depends on our capacities and ways of knowing, our cognitive faculties.” (111) I would have liked to have seen a more careful unpacking of this thesis, but I take the point to be, or at least to imply, the substantive (non-tautological) proposition that the world is not intrinsically knowable as an Aristotelian realist would maintain but knowable only in virtue of certain contributions on our part.  If this is not the point, then it is difficult to see how contemporary antirealism could be “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189)

Metaphysical antirealism divides into cosmological antirealism and ontological antirealism. A cosmological antirealist denies the reality of the world, but needn't deny the reality of the things in the world. Note that 'world' has multiple meanings and that now we are distinguishing between the world as a sort of totality of what is and the world as the members of the totality.

Butchvarov takes his cue from proposition 1.1 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein stipulates that by 'world' he means the totality of facts (die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen), not of things (nicht der Dinge). Now if the world is the totality of facts, then one who denies the reality of facts denies the reality of the world, and is thereby a cosmological antirealist. (113) Such an antirealist need not be an ontological antirealist, i.e., one who denies the reality of things. Since Butchvarov does not question the reality of things (169), he is not an ontological metaphysical antirealist. He is a cosmological antirealist who advocates a form of logical antirealism according to which (i) “there are no logical objects even though logic is present in all thought” (114), and (ii) the “cognized world” depends on the logical expressions of our language rather than on our “mental faculties” as in Kant. (189)

At a first approximation, when Butchvarov says that there are no logical objects what he means is that the logical connectives, the quantifiers, the copula 'is,' and whole declarative sentences do not designate or refer to anything. In old-fashioned terminology, they are syncategorematic or synsemantic expressions. Consider the sentence, 'Tom is tall and Mary is short.' As I understand Butchvarov, he is maintaining that the sentence itself, both occurrences of 'is,' and the single occurrence of 'and' are all logical expressions while the proper names 'Tom' and 'Mary,' and the predicates 'tall' and 'short' are non-logical expressions. There are no logical objects corresponding to logical expressions. (This bald assertion needs be qualified in a separate post on semirealism. Butchvarov takes a semirealist line on facts, the logical objects corresponding to some sentences.) That there are no logical objects is perhaps obvious in the case of the propositional connectives. Few will say that 'and,' 'or,' and 'not' designate objects. The meaning of these words has nothing to do with reference. But while there are no logical objects, there can be no “cognized world” without language, or rather human languages. With this we are brought back to the Paradox of Antirealism. Even though the things in the world do not depend on human animals, the world itself does so depend inasmuch as there would be no world at all without language.

Consider the generic sentence, 'Men are taller than women.' For Butchvarov, many generic sentences are true, but there is nothing in the world that makes them true: they have no corresponding logical objects. And yet without truths like these, and other sorts of truths as well, there would be no world. In this sense, the world, but not the things in it, depends on language-users. Butchvarov's position is roughly similar to Kant's. Kant held that one can be both a transcendental idealist and an empirical realist. Butchvarov is like a transcendental idealist in that he holds that the world depends on language and thus on us; but he is like an empirical realist in that he holds that the things in the world do not depend on us. Like Kant, however, he faces a version of the Paradox of Antirealism: surely it is as absurd to maintain that the world depends on the existence of human animals as to maintain that the things in the world depend on human animals.

Butchvarov's Solution to the Antirealism Paradox

The solution involves a re-thinking of the role of the personal pronouns 'I' and 'we' as they function in philosophical as opposed to ordinary contexts. (See article referenced below.)  The idea is that 'I' and 'we' as they figure in the realism-antirealism debate do not refer to anything in the world, and so they do not refer to human beings; these grammatically personal pronouns refer impersonally to a view or "cognition" of the world, one that is not owned by any person or group of persons.  This view of the world, however, just is the world.  Therefore, the world does not depend logically or causally on the view of the world or on us: "the world and our cognition of it . . . are identical." (191)  To grasp the thought here, you must realize that "cognition" is subjectless: it is not anyone's cognition.

Now let's dig into the details.

Butchvarov's theory can be divided into negative and positive theses.  On the negative side, he claims that (i)  "there is no such entity as the philosophical, metaphysical, self or ego." (191)  Nor (ii) is there any such thing as consciousness as a property or activity of the metaphysical self, or as a relation (or quasi-relation) that connects such selves to their objects. (191) (ii) is a logical consequence of (i).  For if there is no self, then it cannot have properties, stand in relations, or exercise activities.  It also follows from (i) that (iii)  there is no  act-object distinction.  Butchvarov would claim phenomenological support for the first and third claims:  no self appears and no mental acts appear.  Phenomenologically, he is right.  But this doesn't decide the matter since there is also a 'dialectical' assumption at work, something like a Principle of Acquaintance:

Only that with which we are or can become acquainted, only that which can be directly experienced or singled out as an object, can be credited as real and as a possible subject of true and false predications. 

This Principle of Acquaintance (my formulation) is a bridge principle that connects phenomenology to ontology, and makes of phenomenology more than a study of 'mere appearances.'  It would therefore be fair to classify Butchvarov as a phenomenological ontologist along with Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.  As opposed to what?  As opposed to what could be called a metaphysical ontologist who essays to peer behind the phenomenal scene into a realm of 'positive noumena' to use a Kantian phrase, where God and the soul count as positive noumena. Butch of course will have no truck with positive noumena, nor even with Kant's negative noumenon, the unknowable Ding an sich.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Butchvarov neither affirms nor denies the negative noumenon.

One sort of move that the Butchvarovian approach rules out is a transcendental inference from what is given to transcendental conditions of the given's givenness that cannot themselves be brought to givenness.  Someone might say this:

Granted, the subject of experience does not itself appear as just one more object of experience.  But this failure to appear is precisely what one ought to expect: for as a necessary condition of any object's appearing it cannot itself appear as an object.  The fact that it does not and cannot appear is no argument against its existence.  For it is precisely a transcendental condition of objectivity.  Just as there must be an 'accusative of manifestation,' something that appears, there must also be a 'dative of manifestation,' an item to which an appearing object appears, but which does not itself appear.

To which Butchvarov might respond that this begs the question by its rejection of the Principle of Acquaintance. The principle disallows any posits that cannot be brought to givenness.  No ego appears, and so there is no dative of manifestation.  And since there is no ego, appearing is non-relational: it is a monadic feature of that which appears.  Objects appear, but not to anything.

But of course this does not end the discussion since one can ask what validates the Principle of Acquaintance.  Why should we accept it given that it cannot be brought to givenness?  Hume claimed that all meaningful ideas derive from sensory impressions.  But what about that (propositional) idea? Is it meaningful?  Then which sensory impressions does it derive from? It appears that  here we end in a stand-off.

Butchvarov's Sartrean position is opposed to the triadic Cartesian schema that Husserl presupposes:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.

For Butchvarov, there is no ego and there are no cogitationes; there are only the cogitata and their appearing.  He speaks of objects and their "lightening" and "revealing." (205)  He mentions Sartre by name but alludes to Heidegger as well for whom the world is not the totality of things or the totality of facts but the illuminated space wherein things appear. 

For Butchvarov, then, the structure of consciousness is not triadic but dyadic: there is just consciousness and its objects.  But it is impersonal: it is not anyone's consciousness.  It is the sheer revelation of things, but not to anyone.  Consciousness is exhausted in its revelation of objects: it has no inner nature.  This is a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness.  Butchvarov is a Sartrean externalist about consciousness.

If this externalist view is correct then one can understand why Butchvarov thinks he has solved the Paradox of Antirealism.   If consciousness is no-thing, then it is no thing upon which anything else can depend either logically or causally.   The paradox arises if the things in the world are made dependent for their existence, nature, or intelligibility on any transient parts of the world such as human animals.  The paradox vanishes if consciousness is no thing or things.

Toward a Critique

But wait a minute!  What has now become of the first limb of the paradox?  The first limb reads: 

On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) 

Surely consciousness as no-thing, as a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects, as Mooreanly diaphanous, emanating from nowhere, without a nature of its own, not anchored in a Substantial Mind or in a society of substantial minds, or in animal organisms in nature, ever evacuating itself for the sake of the revelation of objects  -- surely consciousness as having these properties cannot do any shaping or forming.  It cannot engage in any activity.  For it is not a substance.  It is only in its revelation of what is other than it.  All distinctions and all content fall on the side of the object: none come from consciousness itself.  On a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness/mind, it can't do anything such as impose categorial forms on the relatively chaotic sensory manifold.

Kant is the main man here as Butch well appreciates.  Kant's thinking operates under the aegis of a form-matter scheme.  Space and time are the a priori forms of sensibility, and the categories are the a priori forms of the understanding.  These forms are imposed on the matter of sensation.  The vehicle of this imposition is the transcendental unity of apperception.  All of this is our doing, our transcendental doing, whatever exactly this means (which is part of the problem).  Our making of the world is a transcendental making: it is not an immanent process within the world such as a literal making of something out of pre-given materials -- which would presuppose the world as the where-in of all such mundane makings and formings.  Nor is this transcendental making a transcendent making by a transcendent deity.

Now who is it, exactly, who does the forming of the sensory manifold?  Who imposes the categorial forms on the matter of sensation?  It cannot be human animals or their brains.  It cannot be anything in the world.  Nor can it be anything out of the world either.  And what, exactly, is this activity of forming?  It cannot be an empirical process in the world.  Not can it be a transcendent process such as divine creation.  What then?

These problems are part and parcel of the Paradox of Antirealism.  The paradox cannot get off the ground without the notions of forming, shaping, imposing, etc. whereas Butchvarov's solution to the paradox in terms of an impersonal, subjectless, non-substantial consciousness without a nature does away with all forming, shaping and imposing.  Mind so conceived cannot impose forms since all forms, all distinctions, all content determinations are of the side of the object.  How can Mind be spontaneous (a favorite Kantian word) and active if Mind is not a primary substance, an agent?

My suspicion, then, tentatively proffered, is that Butchvarov does not solve the Paradox of Antirealism; he dissolves it by in effect rejecting the first limb. It is clear to me how he removes anthropocentrism from metaphysics; what is not clear to me is hgow what is left over can still be called antirealism.

There is also the question of whether the philosophical uses of 'I' and 'we' that are essential to the formulation of the realism-antirealism debate are really impersonal uses.  To that issue I will return in a later entry.

Related articles

Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

Panayot Butchvarov in his latest book claims that the first-person singular pronoun as it functions in such typical philosophical contexts as the Cartesian cogito is "a dangling pronoun, a pronoun without an antecedent noun."  (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 40)  In this entry I will try to understand and evaluate Butchvarov's fascinating claim.  But first we must sort out some obscurity in Butchvarov's presentation of what I take to be a genuine problem, the problem of what, if anything, one refers to with 'I' when one says or thinks, 'I think therefore I am.'

If a dangling pronoun is one without an antecedent, then a non-dangling pronoun would be one with an antecedent.  But while some pronouns have antecedents, it is not clear that indexical uses of pronouns have antecedents.  This is relevant because the use of  ego or 'I' in the Cartesian cogito is an indexical use.  So what is the problem with this indexical use that lacks an antecedent?  Consider first a sentence featuring a pronoun that has an antecedent:

Peter always calls before he visits.

In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.'  It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:

After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.

In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading.  The antecedency is referential rather than temporal.  In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent.  The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent.  So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent.  The antecedent is referentially prior to to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent.  But suppose I point to Peter and say

He smokes cigarettes.

This is an indexical use of 'he.'  Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction.  Another part of what makes it an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference.  Now suppose I say

I smoke cigars.

This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is a purely indexical (D. Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration:  I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.'  And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.'  Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.

In fact, it seems that no indexical expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent.  Hector Castaneda puts it like this:

Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)

This seems right.  So if a dangling pronoun is one without a noun antecedent as Butchvarov maintains, then 'he' and 'I' in our last examples are dangling pronouns.  But this is not a problem.  What Butchvarov is getting at, however, is a problem.  So I suggest that what he really means by a dangling pronoun is not one without a noun antecedent, but a pronoun which cannot be replaced salva veritate in any sentence in which it occurs with a noun.

For example, in most ordinary contexts my  uses of 'I' refer to BV, a publicly identifiable person, and only to this person.  In these contexts  'I' can be replaced by 'BV'  salva veritate.  Although 'I live in Arizona' (when uttered by BV) and 'BV lives in Arizona' differ in sense, so that the replacement cannot be made salva significatione, the two sentences have the same truth-value, and presumably also the same truth-maker, BV's living in Arizona.

To put the point more generally, in most ordinary contexts tokens of 'I' are replaceable salva veritate in the sentences in which they occur with tokens of proper names or definite descriptions or demonstrative phrases.  Thus the following sentences have the same truth-value and are presumably made true by the same concrete fact or state of affairs:

I am a native Californian [uttered by BV]
BV is a native Californian
The best chess-playing philosopher in the Superstition Foothills is a native Californian
That man [with a pointing toward BV] is a native Californian.

Let us say that such ordinary uses of 'I' are  anchored (my term).  For in each case the 'I'-token is anchored or can be anchored in a non-indexical term such as a proper name or a definite description that refers to the same item that the 'I'-token refers to.  But we shouldn't confuse anchors and antecedents.  Every antecedent of a pronoun anchors that pronoun, but not every anchor of a pronoun is an antecedent of it.  Thus 'BV' anchors the 'I' in 'I am hungry' assertively uttered by BV; but 'BV' is not the antecedent of the 'I' in the sentence in question.  The 'I'-token in the sentence in question has, and needs, no antecedent.

In typical philosophical contexts, however, 'I' appears to be what Butchvarov confusingly calls a dangling pronoun, “a pronoun without an antecedent noun.” (40) If I say, “I was born in California,” I refer to the man BV, a transient chunk of the physical world, a bit of its fauna. The pronoun in this context is replaceable salva veritate by the proper name, 'BV.'  But when I thoughtfully say or write “I think therefore I am,” or “I doubt therefore I am” in the context of a search for something indubitable, something whose existence cannot be doubted, I cannot be taken to be referring to the man BV.  For the existence of this man can be doubted along with the existence of every other physical thing.  

Butchvarov is on to something, but he expresses himself in a confusing and confused way.  His point is not that the 'I' in 'I think therefore I am' lacks an antecedent, for this is also true in unproblematic sentences such as 'I am hungry.'  The point is that the ego of the cogito , the 'I' of the 'I think therefore I am' is not anchored, i.e., not replaceable salva veritate with  a proper name or definite description or demonstrative phrase in the way that the 'I' in 'I am hungry' when assertively uttered by BV can be replaced by a token of 'BV.'

The problem that Butchvarov is on to is that in the cogito situation we seem to have  a use of the word 'I' -- a genuine  indexical use, not a quasi-indexical use or a quantificational use -- that does not pick out the speaker or any physical thing.   What then does it pick out?

At this point you can and perhaps ought to ask: How could what is grammatically the first-person singular pronoun not function as an indexical term?  Well, suppose I am explaining Brentano's theory of intentionality to a student and I say,

1. I cannot be conscious without being conscious of something.

Clearly, what I am trying to convey to the student is not some fact about myself, but a fact, if it is a fact, about any conscious being.  The proposition I am trying to get across is more clearly put as follows:

2. For any x, if x is a person, and x is conscious, then x is conscious of something.

Curiously, 'I' can be used to mean anyone.  So I say a token of (1) features a quantificational use of 'I,' not an indexical use. The reference of an indexical term depends on the context of its deployment, use, tokening.  Thus the indexical 'I' used by BV refers to BV and cannot be used by BV to refer to anyone other than BV.  But the reference of 'I' in (1) does not vary with the persons who use it.  So 'I' in (1) is not an indexical.  It functions essentially like a bound variable.

Back to our problem.    What am I referring to when I enact the Cartesian cogito? Let's consider a second classical example to get the full flavor of the problem. 

What am I referring to when I enact the Augustinian Si fallor, sum?  (The City of God, XI, 26)"If I am mistaken, I am."  In my life I have been mistaken about many things.  Is there anything about which I can be certain that I am not mistaken?  If yes, then it is not the case that everything is open to doubt.  Thinking about this,  I hit upon the old insight of the Bishop of Hippo: If I am mistaken about this or that, or deceived about this or that,  then I am, whence it follows that there is at least one thing about which I cannot be mistaken, namely, that I exist.

What does 'I' refer to in the philosophical conclusions 'I cannot doubt that I exist' and 'I cannot be mistaken about my own existence'?  I agree with Butchvarov that these uses of 'I'  -- call them philosophical uses to distinguish them from ordinary uses -- cannot refer to the speaker or to any physical thing.   If they did, the question would be begged against the skeptic and no fundamentum inconcussum would have been reached.

At this point some will say that 'I' does not refer to anything, that it is a mere expletive, a bit of linguistic filler that functions like the 'it' in 'She made it clear that she would not tolerate her husband's infidelity' or like the 'it' in 'It is snowing' as opposed to the 'it' in 'It is a snow flake.'  Accordingly, 'I am thinking . . . .'  means ''There is thinking going on . . ..'  But I don't want to discuss this view at present.  I will  assume with Butchvarov that 'I' used philosophically as in the Cartesian and Augustinian cases  does have a referent just as the 'I' of ordinary contexts has a referent.  Unlike names and descriptions, indexical uses of 'I' have seemed to most theorists  to be guaranteed against reference failure and in a two-fold sense:  My uses of 'I' cannot fail to refer to something and indeed to the right thing.  I can't be a 'bad shot' when I fire an 'I'-token: I can't hit PB, say, instead of BV.

So 'I' deployed philosophically has a referent but not a physical referent.  This seems to leave us with only two options: 'I' used philosophically refers to a metaphysical self or it refers to something that is not a self at all.   I incline toward the first view; Butchvarov affirms the second. 

Well, why not say something like what Descartes and such latter-day Cartesians as Edmund Husserl either said or implied, namely, that the primary reference of the indexical 'I' is to a thinking thing, a res cogitans, a metaphysical self, a transcendental ego? One might argue for this view as follows. (This is my argument.)

a. Every indexical use of 'I' is immune to reference failure in a two-fold sense: it cannot fail to have a referent, and it cannot fail have the right referent.  (This point has been urged by P. F. Strawson.)

b. Every philosophical use of 'I' is an indexical use. 

Therefore

c. Every philosophical use of 'I' is immune to reference failure. (a, b)

d. Every indexical use of 'I' refers to the user of the  'I'-token.  (A user need not be a speaker.)

e. No philosophical use of 'I' refers to an item whose existence can be doubted by the user of the 'I'-token.

f. Every physical thing is such that its existence can be doubted.

Therefore

g. Every philosophical use of 'I' refers to a meta-physical item such as a Cartesian thinking thing. (c-f)

Butchvarov won't accept this argument.  One point he will make  is that the metaphysical self, if there is one, is an item that could be referred to only by an indexical.  "But would anything be an entity if it could be referred to only with an indexical?" (39)  A thinker that is only an I "borders on incoherence." (39) I take the point to be that nothing could count as an entity unless it is referrable-to in third-person ways.  So BV and PB are entities because, while each can refer to himself in the first-person way by a thoughtful deployment of an 'I'-token, each can also be referred to in third-person ways.  Thus anyone, not just PB, can refer to PB using his name and such definite descriptions as 'the author of Anthropocentism in Philosophy.'  Philosophical uses of 'I,' however, cannot be replaced by names or descriptions or demonstrative phrases having the same reference.  The philosophical 'I' is a dangling pronoun. There is no name or description that can be substituted for it.

For Butchvarov, there cannot be a pure subject of thought, a pure ego, ein reines Ich, etc.  Butchvarov would also point out that talk of such involves the monstrous transformation of pronouns into nouns as we speak of pure egos and ask how many there are.   He would furthermore insist Hume-fashion that no such item as a pure I is every encountered in experience, outer or inner.  If I replied that it is the very nature of the ultimate subject of thought and experience to be unobjectifiable, he would presumably revert to his point about the incoherence of supposing that any entity could be the referent of a pure indexical only.

I concede that Butchvarov has  a reasonable case against (g), though I do not think he has refuted it.  But let us irenically suppose that (g) is false.  Then which of the premises of my argument must Butchvarov reject?  If I understand him, he would reject (d):  Every indexical use of 'I' refers to the user of the  'I'-token.  His view is  that only some do and that the philosophical uses such as we have in the Cartesian and Augustinian examples do not refer to the user of the 'I'-token.  They do not refer to persons or anything at the metaphysical core of a person such as a metaphysical ego.

To what then do they refer?  Here is where things get really interesting.

Butchvarov's proposal is that the philosophical (as opposed to the ordinary) uses of the grammatically personal pronoun 'I' are logically impersonal: they refer not to persons but to views ("cognitions" in a broad sense) that needn't be the views of any particular person.   I take him to be saying that the philosophical uses of 'I' are indexical uses that are impersonal uses, as opposed to saying that the philosophical uses are  non-indexical impersonal uses. (1) above is an example of a non-indexical impersonal use of 'I.'  As I read him, Butchvarov is not saying that the philosophical uses are like (1).

To show  how a use of 'I' could refer to a view rather to a person, Butchvarov offers us this example:

3. I can't believe you left your children in the car unattended! (197) 

One who says this is typically not referring  to himself and stating a fact about what he can or cannot believe.  He is reasonably interpreted as using the sentence "to indicate the view that leaving children unattended in a car is grossly imprudent." (197)  Thus (3) is better rendered as

4. Leaving children unattended in a car is grossly imprudent. 

Now I grant that 'I' in (3) is impersonal in that it is not plausibly read as referring to the speaker of (3), or to any person.  But I fail to see how 'I' in (3) indicates (Butchvarov's word) a view or proposition, the view or proposition expressed by (4).  If a term indicates, then it is an indicator, which is to say that it is an indexical.  But 'I' in (3) is not an indexical.  I say it is an impersonal non-indexical use of 'I.'  If 'I' in (3) were an indexical, then different speakers of (3) would be referring to different views or propositions.  But if Manny, Moe, and Jack each assertively utter (3), they express the same proposition, (4).

Butchvarov sees that the philosophical uses of 'I' cannot refer to the speaker or to any innerworldly entity, on pain of begging the question against the skeptic.  For the existence of any intramundane entity can be doubted.  But he also insists, with some plausibility, that the philosophical uses of 'I' cannot refer to any transcendental or pre-mundane or extra-mundane entity.  Now if the referent of the philosophical 'I' is neither in the world nor out of it, what is left to say but that the referent is the world itself?  Not the things in the world, but the world as the unifying totality of these things.  And that is what Butchvarov says.  "In the philosophical contexts that would render reference to the speaker or any other inhabitant of the world question-begging, 'I' indicates a worldview and thus also the world." (198)

Now a crucial step in his reasoning to this conclusion is the premise that a view or "cognition" "need not be a particular person's cognition." (197)  Not every view is optical, but consider an optical view from the observation deck of the Empire State Building.  Butchvarov claims that it would be "absurd" to ask: Whose view is it?  One sees his point: that view is not 'owned' by Donald Trump, say, or by any particular person.  But it does not follow that there can be an optical view without a viewer.  Every view is the view of some viewer or other even if no view is tied necessarily to some particular person such as Donald Trump. So the question, Whose view is it? has a reasonable answer: it is the view of anyone who occupies the point of view.  The view into the Grand Canyon from the South Rim at the start of the Bright Angel Trail is the view of anyone who occupies that position, which is not to say that the view presupposes the existence of BV or PB or any particular person.  But an actual view does presuppose the existence of some viewer or other.  And so if the actual world is a (nonoptical) view, then it too has to be someone's view.  There can be a view from nowhere since not every view is optical, but I balk at a view by no one.  If I am right, Butchvarov has failed to solve the paradox of antirealism.  But to explain this would require a separate post.

As I see it, Butchvarov's argument trades on the confusion of 'No view is tied necessarily to some definite person' (true) and 'No view requires a viewer, some viewer or other.' (false)

Butchvarov further maintains that if a  proposition is described as true, it would be absurd to ask: Whose truth is it? (197)  In one sense this is right.  That 7 + 5 =12 is not my truth or your truth.  But it doesn't follow that truths can exist without any minds at all. Classically, truth is adequation of intellect and thing, and cannot exist without intellects, whether finite or divine. Truth is Janus-faced: it faces the world and it faces the mind.  Truth is necessarily mind-involving.  I suggest that truth conceived out of all relation to any mind is an incoherent notion.

This is even clearer in the case of knowledge.  Butchvarov claims that if physics is described as a body of knowledge, it would be absurd to ask: Whose knowledge is it?  Well of course it is not Lee Smolin's knowledge or the knowledge of any particular person. But if there were no physicists there would be no physics.  In general, if there were no knowers, here would be no knowledge.  Even if truths can float free of minds, it is self-evident that knowledge cannot.  Knowledge exists only in knowers even if truth can exist apart from any knowers.

And so a worldview that is not anyone's view is a notion hard to credit.  And that a philosophical use of 'I' could indicate a worldview is even harder to understand. 

Summary

Butchvarov is trying to understand the philosophical uses of 'I' as we find them in the well-known Augustinian, Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian contexts.  He is trying to find a way to reconcile the following propositions:

5.  These philosophical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are referential.
6.  These uses are indexical.
7.  These uses do not refer to thinking animals or to any objects in the world.
8.  These uses  do not refer to Augustinian souls or Cartesian thinking things or Kantian noumenal selves or Husserlian transcendental egos.

Butchvarov reconciles this tetrad by adding to their number:

9. These uses are impersonal and refer to the world. (192)

In a subsequent post I will try to show that Butchvarov is entangled in essentially the same problem that Kant encounters when he tries to understand the unity of experience, the unity of the phenomenal world, in terms of the "'I think' that must be able to accompany all my representations."  (CPR B131)  The mystery is how the words 'I' and 'think' which have clear ordinary uses are appropriate to express the unity of experience when these words used philosophically cannot designate any items IN experience or OUT of experience.

A 'No' to 'No Self'

Dale Tuggy is in town and we met up  on Thursday and Friday.  On Good Friday morning I took him on a fine looping traipse in the Western Superstitions out of First Water trail head to Second Water trail to Garden Valley, down to Hackberry Spring, and then back to the Second Water trail via the First Water creek bed.  We were four hours on the trail, 6:55 - 10:55, both of us wired up (in both senses of that term) for one of Dale's famous podcasts.  One of the topics discussed was the Buddhist anatta/anatman doctrine which we both respectfully reject.  I believe that Dale concurred with all of the following points I made and with some others as well:

1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.

2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

Related articles

Heidegger, Carnap, Das Nichts, and the Analytic-Continental Schism

Simone Weil in the Light of Plato: Notes on Phaedo 83

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

Nothing is Written in Stone

The curiosity to the left, sent to me without commentary by the inscrutable and seldom seen Seldom Seen Slim, raises a number of deep and fascinating questions.

The sentence to the left can be read either literally or metaphorically. My analysis in this entry is concerned with a literal reading only.

1. If nothing is written in stone, then no sentence is written in stone.  But the sentence to the left is written in stone.  Therefore, it is not the case that nothing is written in stone.  Therefore, the sentence to the left, if true, is false.  And if it is false, then of course it is false.  (Our sentence is not like the Liar sentence which, if true is false, and if false is true.) Therefore, whether the stone sentence  is true or false, it is false.  Therefore, it is necessarily false, and its negation -- 'Something is written in stone' -- is necessarily true. (Bivalence is assumed.)

But this is paradoxical!  For while it is the case that the sentence is false it could have been true.  For it is possible that nothing ever have been written in stone.  Therefore, it is not the case that the sentence in question is necessarily false.  Something has gone wrong with my analysis.  What has gone wrong, I think, is that I have failed to observe a  distinction I myself have drawn in earlier entries between propositional self-refutation and performative self-refutation.

2.  Consider 'There are no true propositions.' This is a proposition and it is either true or false. If true, then false.  And if false, then false.  So necessarily false.  This is a clear example of propositional self-refutation.  The proposition refutes itself by itself. No human act or performance comes into the picture.   'There are no assertions' is quite different.  This is either true or false. And we know it is false as a matter of contingent fact.  But it is not self-refuting because if it were true it would not follow that it is false.  It does not refute itself by itself.  For if it were true that there are no assertions, then it would be true that there are no assertions. (Compare: if it were true that that there are no true propositions, then it would be false that there are no true propositions.)

All we can say is that 'There are no assertions,' while it can be asserted, cannot be asserted with truth.  For the performance of assertion falsifies it.  We thus speak here of performative inconsistency or performative self-refutation.  The truth of 'There are no assertions,' if it is true, is assertively inexpressible.  It is impossible that I, or anyone, assert, with truth, that there are no assertions; but it it does not follow that it is impossible that there be no assertions.

'I do not exist' is another example of performative self-refutation.  I cannot assert, with truth, that I do not exist.  For I cannot make the assertion without existing.  Indeed, I can't even think the thought *I do not exist*  without existing.  But the impossibility of my thinking this thought does not entail the necessity of my existence. Necessarily, if I think, then I exist.  But the necessity of the consequence does not transfer to the consequent.  Both of the following are true and thus logically consistent: I cannot think without existing; I exist contingently.  I cannot use the Cartesian cogito to show that I am a necessary being. (Nor can you.)

And similarly with 'Nothing is written in stone' inscribed in stone.  The 'performance' of inscribing in stone falsifies the sentence while 'verifying' its negation: if I inscribe in stone 'Something is written in stone,' I provide a concrete instance of the existentially general sentence.  (Am I punning on 'concrete'?)

My point, then, is that our lapidary example is not an example of strictly propositional self-refutation but of performative self-refutation where the performance in question is that of inscribing in stone.  But why is this so interesting?

3. One reason is that it raises the question of inexpressible propositions.  Interpreted literally, though perhaps not charitably, our stone sentence expresses a proposition that cannot be expressed salva veritate in stone.  For if we try to express the proposition by producing an inscription in stone, we produce a sentence token whose existence falsifies the proposition.  This holds in every possible world.  In no world in which nothing is written in stone can this proposition be expressed in stone.

But the proposition expressed by the stone sentence can be expressed salva veritate in speech.  Consider a possible world W in which  it is literally true that nothing is written in stone, i.e., a world in which there are no stone inscriptions, in any language, of any declarative sentence.  If a person in W assertively utters the sentence 'Nothing is written in stone,' he expresses a proposition true in W.

'There are no sayings' cannot be expressed salva veritate in speech but it can be expressed in stone. 

I conclude that there are possibly true propositions which, while they are expressible, are not expressible in all media.  The proposition expressed by our stone inscription above is true in some possible worlds but not expressible by stone inscriptions in any possible world. 

Note also that there are actually true propositions that cannot be expressed in some media.  In the actual world there is no ink that is compounded of the blood of Irishmen, 5W30 motor oil, and the urine of my cat, Max Black.  So it is actually true that there is no such ink.  This truth, however, cannot be expressed in writing that uses the ink in question.

A really interesting question is whether there are true propositions or possibly true propositions that are inexpressible salva veritate in every medium. I mean inexpressible in principle, not inexpressible due to our finite resources. 

Buddhists typically say that all is empty and all is impermanent.  Could it be true that all is empty despite the fact that this very thesis must be empty and therefore devoid of a determinate sense and a determinate truth value?  Could it be true that all is impermanent despite the fact that this very thesis is impermanent?

Sophistry in True Detective: On the Supposed Illusion of Having a Self

The other day I referred to the following bit of dialogue from the new HBO series, True Detective, as sophistry. Now I will explain why I think it to be such.  Here is the part I want to focus on.  The words are put in the mouth of the anti-natalist Rustin Cohle.  I've ommitted the responses of the Woody Harrelson character.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in  evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Sorting through this crap is as painful as reading the typical student paper.  Where does one start with such a farrago of Unsinn?  But here goes. The main points made above are these:

1. The emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness in human animals is an accident, a fluke of evolution.

2. We are each under the illusion of having, or being, a self when in fact there are no selves.

3. We have been programmed by nature to suffer from this illusion.

4. The honorable thing to do is to deny our programming, refuse to procreate, and embrace our extinction as a species.

Each of these theses is either extremely dubious or demonstrably incoherent, taken singly, not to mention the dubiousness of the 'is'-'ought' inference from (3) to (4).  But in this entry I will address (2) alone.

'There are no selves' is what our anti-natalist means when he say that everybody is nobody.  For it is a Moorean fact, undeniable even by our anti-natalist, that every living human body is some living human body or other.  He is not denying that plain fact but that these living human bodies are selves. 

Performative Inconsistency

Now 'There are no selves,' if asserted  by a being  who understands what he says and means what he says, is asserted by a conscious and self-conscious being.  But that is just what a self is.  A self is a conscious being capable of expressing explicit self-consciousness by the use of the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.'  Therefore, a self that asserts that there are no selves falls into performative inconsistency.  The very act or performance of asserting that there are no selves or that one is not a self falsifies the content of the assertion.  For that performance is a performance of a self.

The claim that there are no selves is therefore self-refuting.

Assertion is a speech act.  But we get the same result if one merely thinks the thought that one is not a self without expressing it via an assertive utterance.  If I think the thought *I am not a self,* then that thought is falsified by the act of thinking it since the act is the act of a self.

The point can also be made as follows.  If there are no selves, then I am not a self.  But if I am not a self, then I do not exist.  Perhaps some living human body exists, but that body cannot be my body if I do not exist.  What makes this body my body is its connection with me.  So I must exist for some body to be my body.  My body is my body and not my body's body.  So I am not identical to my  body.  I have a body.   'This body is this body' is a tautology. 'I am this body' is not a tautology. If I exist, then I am distinct from my body and from any body.

So if I am not a self, then I do not exist.  But the thought that I do not exist is unthinkable as true.  Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if 'I' picks out merely a momentary self.  (I am not committed by this line of reasoning to a substantial self that remains numerically the same over time.)  So we have performative inconsistency. 

This reasoning does not show that I am a necessary being, or that I have or am an immortal soul, or even that I am a res cogitans in Descartes' sense.  What it shows is that the self cannot be an illusion.  It shows that anyone who carefully considers whether or not he is a self can attain the certain insight that he is at least as long as he is thinking these thoughts. 

Soviel Schein, soviel Sein

There is another way of looking at it.  If each of us is under the illusion of having a self or being a self, then who is being fooled?  To whom does this false seeming appear?  There cannot be illusions in a world without conscious beings.  An illusion by its very nature is an illusion to consciousness.  So if consciousness is an illusion, then it is not an illusion.  The same holds for the self.  If the self is an illusion, then the self is not an illusion.

There cannot be Schein (illusion) without Sein (being).  "So much seeming, so much being."

Related articles

The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity?

Sweet Dreams of Dennett

 

Guilt and Identity

Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then?  Not very well.  I was different all right, but not numerically.

One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity.  (Roughly, a person at a time is a bundle of mental data; a person over time is a bundle of these bundles.)  But even if such a theory were otherwise in the clear it is difficult to square such a theory with what appears to be a non-negotiable datum:  I and no one else did such-and-such 30, 40, 50 years ago; I am the source of that misdeed; I could have, and should have, done otherwise.  We convict ourselves in memory knowing that the one who remembers is strictly the same as the one who did the deed.

The mystery of the self!

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*Every Proposition is Affirmative*

Nicholas Rescher cites this example from Buridan.  The proposition is false, but not self-refuting.  If every proposition is affirmative, then of course *Every proposition is affirmative* is affirmative.  The self-reference seems innocuous, a case of self-instantiation. But *Every proposition is affirmative* has as a logical consequence *No proposition is negative.*  This follows by Obversion, assuming that a proposition is negative if and only if it is not affirmative.

Paradoxically, however, the negative proposition, unlike its obverse, is self-refuting.  For if no proposition is negative then *No proposition is negative* is not negative.  So if it is, it isn't.  Plainly it is. Ergo, it isn't.

Rescher leaves the matter here, and I'm not sure I have anything useful to add. 

It is strange, though, that here we have two logically equivalent propositions one of which is self-refuting and the other of which is not.  The second is necessarily false.  If true, then false; if false, then false; ergo, necessarily false.  But then the first must also be necessarily false.  After all, they are logically equivalent: each entails the other across all logically possible worlds.

What is curious, though, is that the ground of the logical necessity seems different in the two cases.  In the second case, the necessity is grounded in logical self-contradiction.  In the first case, there does not appear to be any self-contradiction.

It is impossible that every proposition be affirmative.  And it is impossible that no proposition be negative.  But whereas the impossibility of the second is the impossibility of self-referential inconsistency, the impossibility of the first is not.  (That is  the 'of' of apposition.)

Can I make an aporetic polyad out of this?  Why not?

1. Logically equivalent logically impossible propositions have the same ground of their logical impossibility.

2. The ground of the logical impossibility of *Every proposition is affirmative* is not in self-reference.

3. The ground of the logical impossibility of *No proposition is negative* is in self-reference.

The limbs of this antilogism are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.

REFERENCES

Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and Resolution, Open Court, 2001, pp. 21-22.

G. E. Hughes, John Buridan on Self-Reference, Cambidge UP, 1982, p. 34. Cited by Rescher.

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When Is Retorsion Probative?

More on the Supposed Non-Existence of the Self

Peter Lupu e-mails:

In your recent post criticizing Harris' argument against the self (which is already present in Hume) you point out that the argument against the self is lacking. It is lacking, you argue, because from the mere fact that the self is not revealed in certain types of introspective experiences it does not follow that the self does not exist. I agree.

But a stronger complaint can be advanced. Harris (and Hume) must answer the following question: Who (what) is doing the introspection (meditation) which allegedly reveals no experience of the self? I suggest that there is no reasonable candidate for such a role other than the self. And so now an explanation can be given to the puzzle how come introspection does not reveal the self; it fails to do so because the self is inevitably absent from the introspective field in order to perform the introspective function. But the self leaves its own recognizable trail behind; it is the trail of a conscious subject which unifies the various experiences encountered by the introspective self as belonging to the same person. If it were not for this trail, the introspective self would have no reason to think that this toothache and that memory or desire belong to one and the same subject.

I think your searching-for-my-glasses-on-my-nose example illustrates well the point.

It is a pleasure to have Peter as a sort of philosophical alter ego who sees many matters as I do.  Here are the main points and I think we agree on all of them.

1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.

2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Therein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

Related articles

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Galen Strawson versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics.  (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)

In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:

I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

The above can be distilled into three propositions:

1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.

2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.

3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.

Harris continues:

The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

To continue with the distillation:

4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity.  There is nothing irrational about it.

5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."

6.  One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.

7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.

There is much to agree with here.  Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5).  Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss.  My present concerns are (6) and (7).

Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights.  Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience?  Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion.  But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation.  I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period.  Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.

So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds:  there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.

It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it. 

It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.

Here is an analogy.  An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses.  He searched  high and low, from morning til night.  Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place.  His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!

The analogy works with the eyes as well.  From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes.  My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place.  Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.

It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self.  It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.

It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?

My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own. 

For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

 

 

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The Atheist

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity?

According to the The New York Times, Daniel Dennett has a new book coming out entitled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.  Here are a couple of tidbits from the NYT piece:

The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams.

The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.

This sure sounds like the sort of sophistry Dennett is known for.  Selves are fictions that allow us -- selves -- to integrate data streams.  I hope I will be forgiven for finding that unintelligible.

Now which is more likely to be true, that qualia are "sheer illusion" or that Dennett is a sophist?

You know my answer.  Here are a couple of anti-Dennett posts:

Searle, Dennett, and Zombies

Dennett's Dismissal of Dualism

Others, of equal trenchancy, are in the Dennett category. 

More on my Non-Identity With My Living Body

Maximilian J. Nightingale writes:

You laid out this syllogism in a recent post:

My living body will  become a dead body; 
I will never become a dead body;
therefore, I am  not identical to a living body.

It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second premises, then one must say that both Bill and his living body will become a dead body, or that neither will.  It seems that where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be.  So also, it seems that where Bill used to be, a dead body will begin to be.

I don't see that the reader has refuted the argument.  Yes, 'becomes' means the same in both premises. 

Now the first premise is true:   It is clear that one day my living body will undergo a radical change and become a dead body: the same body that today is alive will on a future date no longer have the property of being alive but will instead have the property of being dead.  (I am assuming some 'normal' way of dying, as opposed to being instantaneously annihilated in a nuclear blast.  More on this in a moment.)  This is an alterational change: one and the same body will exist at different times in different states, first alive, then dead.  So it is not the case, as the reader claims, that "where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be."  That would be an existential change, not an alterational one.  It is not the case that a dead body will begin to be; one and the same body will go from being alive to being dead.

The second premise is also true.  When my body dies, I will cease to exist; but when my body dies it won't cease to exist: it will continue to exist for a while as a corpse.  This is an existential change in me, not an alterational change:  I will cease to exist.  It is not the case that I will change in respect of the property of being alive.

Therefore, I cannot be identical to my living body.  'Will no longer exist' is true of me, but not true of my body. 

"But what if you are annihilated in an explosion so that there is no corpse?"  At this point the argument takes a modal turn.  Even if my body does not continue to exist after I cease to exist, it could;  but it is not possible that I continue to exist after I cease to exist.  So again we have a difference in properties and non-identity.

I have been assuming mortalism, the doctrine that I cease to exist when my body dies.  If mortalism is false, and I exist even after the death of my body, then a fortiori I am not identical to my living body.

Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?

In his latest and last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was [sic] not true."  It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle.  But that is not my theme.

Is a person just his body?  The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body?  Am I identical to my body?  Am I one and the same with my body, where body includes brain?  Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.

1. I am not now identical to a dead body, a corpse.  There is, no doubt, a dead body in my future, one with my name on it.  But that lifeless object won't be me.  I will never become a corpse.  I will never be buried or cremated.  I am not now and never will be identical to a dead body.  For when the corpse with my name on it  comes to exist, I will have ceased to exist; and when I cease to exist, it will still exist.  This property difference via the Indiscernibility of Identicals entails the non-identity of me and 'my' corpse. 

'My' corpse is the corpse that will come into existence when I cease to exist, or, if mortalism is false, when I am separated from my body.  Strictly speaking, no corpse is my corpse: hence the scare quotes around 'my.'  But I can speak strictly of my body: my body is the body that is either identical  to me, or is related to me in some 'looser' way. 

2.  I am obviously not identical to a dead body.  And I have just argued that I will never become identical to a dead body.  Am I  then identical to a  living body?  Not if the following syllogism is sound: My living body will become a dead body;  I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body. 

This argument assumes that if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.  Little is self-evident, but surely this principle is self-evident.  There is something true of my living body that is not true of me, namely 'will become a dead body.'  Therefore, I am not identical to a living body.  And since the only living body I could be identical to if I were identical to a living body would be my living body, I am not identical to my living body.  Of course, I have a living body in some to-be-explored sense of 'have'; the point is that I am not identical to it.

3. Consider now the following rather more plausible identity claim:  I am (identically) a self-conscious animal.  Let's unpack this.  I am a living human animal that says 'I' and means it; I am a thinker of I-thoughts, an example of which is the thought *I am just a self-conscious animal.*  I am self-aware: aware of myself as an object, both as a physical object, a body, through the five outer senses, and as psychological object, a mind, through inner sense or introspection.  Both my body and my mind are objects for me as subject.  As such a self-aware animal, I am aware of being different from my body.  In some sense I must be different from my body (and my mind) if  they are my objects.  'My objects' means 'objects for me as subject.'

Now if you were paying attention you noticed that I made an inferential move the validity of which demands scrutiny.  I moved from

a. I am aware of being different from my body

to

b. I am different from my body.

The materialist is bound to resist this inference.  He will ask how we know that the awareness mentioned in (a) is veridical.  Only if it is, is the inference valid.  He will suggest that it is possible that I have an non-veridical, an illusory, awareness of being different from my body.  I can't credit that suggestion, however.  It cannot be an illusion that I am different from anything I take as object of awareness including my brain or any part of my brain.  That is a primary and indubitable givenness. Awareness is by its very nature awareness of something: it implies a difference between that which is aware, the subject of awareness, and the object of awareness.  Without that difference there could be no awareness of anything.  If the self-aware subject were identical to that object which  is its animal body, then the subject would not be aware of the body. 

4.  Will you say that the body is aware of itself? Then I will ask you which part of the body is the subject of awareness.  Is it the brain, or a proper part of the brain?  When I am aware of my weight or the cut on my arm, is it the brain or some proper part of the brain that is aware of these things?  This makes no sense.  My brain is no more the subject of awareness than my glasses are.  My glasses don't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the glasses.  Similarly, my brain doesn't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the brain (and the visual cortex, and the optic nerves, and the glasses, etc.)  The fact that my visual awareness is causally dependent on my having a functioning brain does not show that my brain or any part of it is the subject of awareness.  I am not identical to my brain or to any bodily thing.

5.   Who or what asks the question:  Am I identical to this body here?  Does the body ask this question?  Some proper part of the body such as the brain?  Some proper part of this proper part?  How could anything physical ask a question?

"Look, there are are certain physical objects that ask themselves whether they are identical to the physical objects they are, and entertain the (illusory) thought that they might not be identical to the physical objects they are."

This little materialist speech is absurd by my lights since no physical object -- as we are given to understand 'physical object' by physics -- could do such a thing.   If you insist that some physical objects can, then you have inflated 'physical' so that it no longer contrasts with 'mental.' 

So with all due respect to the late Mr Hitchens, brilliant talker about ideas whose depth he never plumbed, I think there are very good reasons to deny that one is identically one's body.

Further questions:  If I am not identical to any physical thing, can it be inferred that I am identical to some spiritual thing?  If I am not identical to my body or any part thereof, do I then have a body, and what exactly does that mean? 

The 'Control Argument' for the Anatta Doctrine

In other posts I have sketched the Buddhist doctrine of 'No Self.' I now consider an early Buddhist argument for it. Here are the words of Buddha according to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, his second discourse, the Sermon on the Mark of Not-Self:

 
     The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self,
     this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible
     (to say) with regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body
     be not thus.' But precisely because the body is not self, the body
     lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with
     regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.'


Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one's self, not one's own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one's self would have to be something over which one would have complete control.  The tacit premise is that the self is  something wholly active and spontaneous and self-regulating.  And it is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control.  To suffer is to be passive.  An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent.  (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.) 

After arguing that each of the personality-constituents is outside of our control and brings suffering, Buddha argues that each of the constituents is impermanent and for this reason as well is lacking in
self-nature. The over-all argument of the Anattalakkhana Sutta may therefore be reconstructed in a generalized form as follows:

     1. If anything were the self, then it would have two properties: it
     would not be liable to disease, decay, destruction or change
     generally, and it would be self-determining, i.e., it would have
     complete control over itself.
     2. But nothing in our experience has either of these two
     properties, not the body, or feeling, or perception, or
     consciousness, etc.
     Therefore
     3. Nothing in our experience can be identified as the self.

I have structured the argument so that it is not only valid in point of logical form, but also has plausible premises. (A charitable reconstruction can aim at nothing less.) Thus the addition of 'in our experience' in premise (2) makes this premise more plausible than without the addition. But this gain in plausibility exacts a price:   the conclusion (3) cannot then amount to the unrestricted anatta doctrine according to which nothing at all is a self or has self-nature. It is one thing to say that nothing in our experience can be identified (veridically) as a self, and quite another to say that there is no self.

The Pali Buddhist, of course, wants to arrive at the conclusion that there is no self at all, that nothing at all has self-nature.  I would insist, however, that one cannot validly move directly from (3) to

    4. Nothing can be identified as the self: there is no self at all.

For it may well be that the existence of a (transcendental) self that is not experienced is a necessary condition of establishing that whatever is experienced is not a self. After all, if I come to see  that my body, feelings, perceptions, and so on cannot be identified as my very self, then it is presumably I myself who come to this insight.  If I come to reject body-identification, feeling- identification, etc. as false self-identifications, then presumably there must be at least the possibility of a true self-identification, even if only of the  tautological form, 'I am I.'  If every self-identification were false, then 'I am I' would be false. But that is either a contradiction, or implies that there is nothing that body, feelings, etc. are distinct from, which is again incoherent. For if 'I am not this body' is true, then in some sense I must exist as that from which my body is distinct.  The first-person singular pronoun cannot be wholly referenceless if it is to be true, as it is true, that I am not my body, my feelings, my thoughts, the pain in my neck, etc.

Furthermore, if anyone needs and desires liberation, it is presumably in every case I myself who needs and desires it, and I myself who, if all goes well, achieves it, and indeed achieves it on the basis of my own insight into my non-identity with any of the five khandhas or with the psychophysical complex composed of them. The self who needs, desires, and possibly attains liberation is obviously distinct from each of the khandhas and from the psychophysical complex. My body, obviously enough, cannot come to realize its non-identity with itself, for the simple reason that it is not distinct from itself. The same holds for each of the khandhas, and for the lot of them taken together.

And to suppose that no one desires, needs, or attains liberation would appear to make hash of the whole Buddhist system of soteriology. Buddhism is an existentialist system in roughly Kierkegaard's  sense:  it is the salvation of the "existing individual" that is the unum necessarium and sole desideratum. It is therefore arguable that the   existence of a transcendental self is a cognitive and soteriological  presupposition: it is presupposed if there is to be the insight that no object of experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self, and it is presupposed if there is to be something that is saved from the samsaric predicament.

The gist of the control argument is this. There is no evidence of a self since nothing with which we are acquainted is immutable, and nothing with which we are acquainted is something over which we have complete control.

But this raises an obvious question: Isn't the standard for selfhood being set unattainably high?  The argument isd tantamount tosaying that if I am not God or a god, then I am not a self.  Arguably, God to be God must be impassible; but must a self to be a self be impassible?

For a richer and more rigorous development of this theme, see W. F. Vallicella, "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466

The Dalai Lama and the Self: An Anti-Buddhist Argument

A friend refers me to a rather poor article, "The Dalai Lama, the Pope, and Creation,"  in which the dubious claims of the Dalai Lama are ineptly rebutted by a Catholic journalist.  We read:

Beyond the complex world of nature, Buddhism asserts a fundamental “nothingness.”  Buddhist thought sees as illusory all distinction between beings.  As the Dalai Lama writes in The Universe in a Single Atom, “According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence.” 

This is  one of the central pillars of Buddhism, the doctrine of anatta (Pali), anatman (Sanskrit), 'no self.'  The idea is that nothing, or at least nothing in the realm of samsara, has self-nature, substantiality, own-being, ontological independence, even relative ontological independence.  And that includes persons (selves).  You and I are not independent existents.  The distinction between us is illusory.  From the point of view of Christian metaphysics, this cannot be right.  God is an uncreated  self, and we are created selves.  Although we depend for our existence on God, this fact is thought to be compatible with our genuine (though dependent) existence as self-same individuals numerically distinct from other such individuals.

It is not enough to pit worldviews against one another.  You have to get down to the nitty-gritty of trying to resolve the dispute by careful analysis and argument.  There is no reason to be sanguine about the success of such an enterprise, but you are no philosopher if you do not make the attempt.

I will now argue against the anatta doctrine by arguing that the conscious self cannot be a Heraclitean flux of instantaneous  entities but must be an individual that remains self-same through the flux of its conscious states.

I

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly  perceived. It is not as if
there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states); there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these are taken distributively or collectively.

II

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of
Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But
now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

 
For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this
implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of
them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.

III

Now consider a synchronic example, the hearing of a chord.  Hearing the major chord C-E-G, I hear that it is major, and hearing the minor chord C-E flat-G, I hear that it is minor.  How is this possible?  The hearing of the major chord cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But
this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  Once again the unitary self is given: it is given whenever we hear a chord.

IV

There is also this consideration.  Phenomenologically, mental change is not existential change, but
alterational change, or in a word, alteration.  Existential change, as when something comes into being or passes away, is not a change in something, or at least it is not a change in the thing that suffers the change: a thing that ceases to exist is no longer available to be that in which  this change occurs, and a thing that comes to exist is not available prior to its coming to exist to be that in which this change occurs.  We express this by saying that there is no substratum of existential change. Alteration, however, requires a substratum: alteration occurs when numerically one and the same individual is in different states at different times.

Pali Buddhism, with its interconnected doctrines of radical impermanence and universal selflessness,
implies that that ultimately there is no alteration, that all change is existential change.  For alteration requires substrata of alteration, and substrata are incompatible with anatta.  But if mental change were existential change, there could be no consciousness of it.  If the pleasant visual sensation simply passes out of existence to be replaced by the painful auditory sensation, then there is a change all right – a change in the way things are – but not a change of which there could be any consciousness in the one in whom the change occurs.  Furthermore, there would be no awareness of
dukkha – the starting point of Buddhist soteriology – because there would be no possibility of a perceived contrast of the dukkha-state with the earlier sukha-state (the pleasant awareness of the sunset).

To be aware of the change from the pleasurable state to the painful one, I must endure through the change. Therefore, since there is consciousness of mental change, mental change is alteration and thus requires a substratum that is numerically identical across the change.  The point was appreciated by Kant, who wrote that “A coming to be or a ceasing to be . . . can never be a possible [object of] perception.” (CPR A 188 = B 231)

What this shows is that there is direct awareness of the self as that in which the two distinct states are united.  The fact of experienced mental change refutes the anatta doctrine. There is not just an awareness of one state followed by an awareness of a second; I am aware of myself as the transtemporal unity of the two states.  Unity, of course, is not identity: so talk of the unity of the pleasurable and painful states is consistent with their numerical distinctness.  The self, therefore, is directly given in the experience of mental change; but it is of course not given as a separate object wholly distinct from its states.  It is given in and through these states as their transtemporal unity. The self is not one of its states, nor the sum of all of them, nor  something wholly distinct from all of them; the self is their self-unifying unity.  Thus one must not think of the substratum of mental change as wholly distinct from its states.  It is not like a pin cushion into which pins are stuck.  A pin cushion without pins is conceivable; a self without conscious states is not.  The self is not an unconscious something that supports consciousness; it itself has the nature of consciousness.   Consciousness/self-consciousness is a sui generis reality that cannot be understood in terms of crude  models from the physical world. 

Self-Effacement and Self-Importance

To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance?  I am thinking of Simone Weil.   In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself.  "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit my own personal nothingness face to face with Truth?"

The ego, wily 'structure' that it is, usually (always?) finds a way to affirm itself.

The Problem of First-Person identity Sentences

0. Am I identical to my (living) body, or to the objectively specifiable person who rejoices under the name 'BV'?  Earlier I resoundingly denied this identity, in (rare) agreement with London Ed, but admitted that argument is needed.  This post begins the argument.  We start with the problem of first-person identity sentences.

1. 'I am I' and 'BV is BV' are logical truths.  They have the logical form a = a. They are not particularly puzzling.  But 'I am BV' presents a puzzle, one reminiscent of Frege's puzzle concerning informative identity statements.  'I am BV' is not true as a matter of logic, any more than it is true as a matter of logic that the morning star is the evening star. And yet it is  presumably true that I am BV where 'am' expresses strict numerical identity. It is not as if 'I' and 'BV' refer to two different entities.  Or at least this is not a view we ought to begin by assuming.  The proper procedure is to see if we can make sense of 'I am BV' construed as an identity statement.  Dualism comes later if it comes at all.

2. Here is a theory.  When I say 'I am BV' I am referring to one and the same thing in two different ways, just as, when I say 'The morning star is the evening star' I am referring to  one and the same thing (the planet Venus) in two different ways.  Expressions have sense and they have reference.  Difference of sense is compatible with sameness of reference.  The difference in sense of 'morning star' and 'evening star' explains why the identity statement composed of them is informative; the sameness of reference explains the identity statement's truth.

In Frege's famous example, the common referent is the planet Venus.  What is the common referent of 'I' and 'BV'?  Presumably the common referent is the publicly identifiable person BV.  But when BV designates himself by means of the thought or utterance of 'I,  he designates BV under the aspect, or via the sense, expressed by 'I,' a semantically irreducible sense that cannot be captured by any expression not containing 'I.'

Here then we seem to have a solution to our problem.  In general, one can refer to the same thing in different ways, via different modes of presentation (Darstellungsweisen, in Frege's German).  So apply that to the special case of the self.  What I refer to when I say 'I' is the same entity that I refer to when I say 'BV' and the same entity that Peter refers to when he says 'BV.'   It is just that I refer to the same thing in different ways, a first-person way and third-person way.  There is no need to suppose that 'I and 'BV' have numerically distinct referents.   There is no need to deny the numerical identity of me and BV. Unfortunately, this Fregean solution is a pseudo-solution.  I have two arguments.  I'll give one today.

3. Consider the sentence 'I am this body here' uttered by the speaker while pointing to his body.  If, in this sentence, 'I' refers to this body here (the body of the speaker), albeit via a Fregean sense distinct from that of 'this body here,' then the sense of 'I,' whatever it might be, must be the sense of a physical thing inasmuch as it must be the mode of presentation of a physical thing.  Note that the 'of' in the italicized phrases is a genitivus objectivus.  Somehow this 'I'-sense must determine a reference to a physical thing, this body here.  But that it is the sense of a physical thing is no part of the sense of 'I.'  We understand fully the sense of this term without understanding it to be the sense of a physical thing, a sense that presents or mediates reference to a physical thing.  Indeed, considerations adduced by Anscombe and Castaneda show that the 'I'-sense cannot be the sense of a physical thing.  For if the sense of 'I' cannot be captured by 'this body here,' then a fortiori it cannot be captured by any other expression designating a physical thing.

The analogy with the morning star/evening star case breaks down.  One cannot use 'morning star' and 'evening star' with understanding unless one understands that they refer to physical things, if they refer at all.  It is understood a priori that these terms designate physical things if they designate at all; the only question is whether they designate the same physical thing.  But one can use the first-person singular pronoun with understanding without knowing whether or not it refers to a physical thing.

In other words,  there is nothing in the sense of 'I' to exclude the possibility that it refer to a nonphysical thing, a res cogitans, for example.  Descartes' use of 'ego' to refer to a thinking substance did not violate the semantic rules for the use of this term.  What's more, if 'I' is a referring term and refers via a Fregean sense, then that sense cannot be the sense of a physical thing.

So that's my first argument against the Fregean approach to the problem of first-person identity sentences.  The argument rests on the assumption that 'I' is a referring term.  That assumption has been denied by Wittgenstein, and more rigorously, by Anscombe.  That denial deserves a separate post.  And in that post we ought to rehearse the reasons why 'I' cannot be replaced salva significatione by any such word or phase as 'the person who is now speaking.'