A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness: Lotze, the soul as the principle of activity.

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Wittgenstein, in the course of his Philosophical Investigations, claimed interestingly that when all our attempts at justifications (in terms of the description of the use of words and the rules governing so-called language games) have failed, we rest our case finally on what we as a linguistic community do. That is, as he claimed, in Aristotelian spirit:

“What has to be accepted, the given, is–so one could say–forms of life.”(P.226e)

Connected to this is the claim that :

“Justification by experience must come to an end. If it did not it would not be justification.(485 p136e).

Wittgenstein refers several times to our concepts being connected to general facts of nature(principles?) e.g. the fact that a burnt child fears the fire: and it is these facts that are also constitutive of our forms of life. These facts include Kantian items such as judgments:

241. “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”–It is what human beings say that is true and false: and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

242. If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also(queer as this may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic but does not do so.”

Wittgenstein would therefore agree that the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason govern our judgments. Now it is also clear that the categories of judgment described by Kant are not taken up by Wittgenstein. He is more concerned to chart the territory of the grammar of language. An activity which is not an explanatory exercise but rather a phenomenological exercise in the description of how language is used. This exercise, according to Wittgenstein, provides us with the essence of things, tells us what kind of object anything is. This, in turn, indicates that Wittgenstein’s concentration on the categories of existence and not the categories of judgments puts him in an Aristotelian arena, rather than a Kantian one. The major difference between Kant and Wittgenstein perhaps resides in their different ideas of what concepts are. Wittgenstein claims the following:

“570. Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expressions of our interest, and direct our interest.

Concepts then are the instruments of language but they are also related to what Kant would claim were rules or norms for the unification of representations. When concepts are used, that is, they presuppose knowledge of the representations they are related to, but in Kant, there is a clear differentiation of levels of representation in which intuition and immediate experience of the representation is an activity of the lower faculty of sensibility and the rule uniting a manifold of representations is related to the activity of the higher faculty of understanding. Wittgenstein’s account, however, appears to be anti-abstractionist, almost at times anti-theoretical, and he concretely recommends against looking for the explanations of phenomena and instead looks at the phenomenon of “what happens”, i.e. the phenomenon of how we as a community use language in this arena.(654). He even insists that we should not ask for the meaning of a particular term but rather look to see how the term is used

It is not clear that Aristotle and Kant are the primary targets of the above characterisations. Neither of these figures would have been concerned to analyse our “inner experiences” via the contentious operation of introspection(inner observation). Much of Wittgenstein’s thought in his work the “Philosophical Investigations” is directed at questioning the role of inner experience in our descriptions and explanations.

In relation to this point, when Kant refers to the “I think” he also refers to the dawning of a new kind of conscious thinking, a conceptual kind of thinking that implies a Philosophical Psychology which Wittgenstein is exploring from his grammatical/phenomenological descriptive point of view. Of course on many occasions Wittgenstein is more concerned with the use of a word than with the meaning of, for example, a categorical judgment, although he does appear to recognise that in the case of Hypothetical judgment such as “if he comes I will tell him” that there is a categorical element of a resolution or a promise that can be broken(Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, volume one(prop 4). For Wittgenstein, thinking would be exhibited or manifested in “forms of life” which are as diverse and variegated as a Shakespearean view of everything of interest to be discovered in History. In relation, for example, to our emotions such as grief, we are dealing, Wittgenstein argues, with patterns of behaviour that are evaluated in accordance with such attitudes as “attitudes toward a soul”, attitudes which build upon the picture we have of the human body. If, however, Wittgenstein would be prepared to embrace an Aristotelian hylomorphic view of the soul as being a principle, his comment takes on an interesting aspect, suggesting as it does that our attitude is toward a principle. Attitudes are of course acquired by living in a community that communicates its world-view holistically to its “apprentices”. We should recall here, however, that as Wittgenstein claimed, the laws of logic still apply. Reasons are given for actions and beliefs but Wittgenstein is consistent in his rejection of any inner state or process of understanding being the “environment” of these reasons. In “On Certainty” he claims:

“Giving reasons….. comes to an end;– but the end is not certain propositions striking us as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part, it is acting which lies at the bottom of the language game.”(204)

This is probably aimed at his earlier claim in an earlier work (Tractatus) that a proposition could “show” us its truth, but it also has interesting implications for the Cartesian-inspired Phenomenologists that were pulling us away from exploring the implications of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy. The importance of the above thought is that the giving of reasons is an action that is embedded in the forms of life we find in a community. For Aristotle, this point speaks to the importance of material and efficient “causes”(explanations) of our judgments, but it does not speak directly to the importance of the other two forms of explanation(formal and final) or the 4 kinds of change and three principles of hylomorphic theory. All of these explanations must be taken into account when we are using the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason in our reasoning about our judgments. The Aristotelian “Categories” are illustrations of the claim that “Being has many meanings,” but Kant did not feel that sufficient justifications for this list existed and it was in response to this question that he assembled the categories of judgment in his “Critique of Pure Reason”. This does not mean that Kant would deny the importance in Philosophy of not making what has been called “category mistakes” in one’s judgments. The following are the ten Categories Aristotle proposed:

Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, Having, Acting upon, Being affected.

All the categories have an essential relation to substance which itself is not dependent on anything else in the way the other categories are logically dependent upon it. A number of philosophers have also in this context, complained about what has been called the substantiation of the soul, meaning that those who do this are confusing a principle with what the principle constitutes or regulates. This would be consistent with Aristotle’s later hylomorphic theory and the insistence that “psuche” is a life-form or life principle. For many materialists, this move is equivalent to a Platonic spiritualisation of the soul. These critics, however, have failed to appreciate the manifold ways in which hylomorphic theory is critical of the kind of metaphysical dualism we find at the foundation of Platonic theory, which itself was evolving in a hylomorphic direction after the Republic.

Gilbert Ryle’s work “The Concept of Mind” is famous for its use of the term “category mistake” , famous for criticising the attempt to postulate what he calls the “Ghost in the machine”–the spiritualisation of the soul. The dominance of Platonic dualism over Aristotelian Hylomorphism has been charted in volume one in this work. Both Ryle and Wittgenstein felt that the presence of this “category mistake” was a continuing problem in the Philosophy of their time. Both philosophers sought justification for their positions in ways in which language was used rather than Aristotelian or Kantian Philosophy. Their justification sought to avoid what they saw to be the “abstractions” of Aristotelian and Kantian theory. Both philosophers felt uncomfortable with metaphysical and transcendental forms of explanation or justification, preferring to remain at the empirical/phenomenological level of description of the use of language. What is interesting with respect to Wittgenstein’s position is the suggestion that the Categories of existence of importance are those of “having” and “acting”. The charting of the “logic” of these categories and the emergence of philosophical psychology as a consequence is, of course, interesting for our project of charting the history of the concepts of cognition, emotion, consciousness, and action. Locating the origin of this “shift of perspective” toward action and language in History is difficult but one figure of relevance may be the work of Lotze discussed in Brett’s History of Psychology under the problematic heading of “Psychology becomes self-conscious”:

“Life for Lotze, is a system of activities. It may be explained as a mechanism… Yet for all that materialism is wrong…he rejected Hegel: against his contemporaries, he clung to the belief that idealism still remained the true way of thinking. With one hand he deals out the facts of science, with the other he supplies those principles which unite and systematise the facts… if the soul knows itself in its acts, if, in fact, the error has lain in the persistent separation of Being from Doing, there may still be a more adequate grasp of the whole reality in a doctrine that revises the method first, and then translates into its own terms the language of observation.”(Peters, P.592-3)

Lotze’s materialism emerges in his treatment of the question of how what he calls “the physical” becomes something psychical and this, in turn, generates a dualism that differentiates substantially between the inner world of “experience” and the outer world of “physical ” events. This cocktail of materialism and dualism is exemplified in his treatment of the capacity of “memory” which Brett describes thus:

“Lotze regards the soul as the receiver of incoming currents and the initiator of outgoing current. If we admit any distinct kind of action that can be called mental, if there is any difference between man and the machines, it is necessary to allow that there intervenes between the afferent and the efferent neutral currents a third factor. We may say, then, in the first place, that a psychic factor is not to be excluded a priori. Having cleared his ground, Lotze proceeds to give his reasons for not treating memory, as a mere precipitate of impressions, a storing up of injected copies of things. In opposition to this view, he maintains that memory does not, in fact, keep any such pictures: what it really retains is a kind of scheme, a plan of action, and the term “memory” really denotes the power of acting again in the way in which one acted before, with a recognition of the fact that the action is qualitatively like a previous action.”(Peters, P.595)

This on the face of it fits well with the Aristotelian account of memory as a power but Brett confuses the above account by claiming that this is a typical form of ” a spiritualistic interpretation of memory”. The concentration in the above quote is on action. Memory in its turn requires an act of attention if it is to be integrated into the clearly psychic “scheme”. Lotze, however, confirms Brett’s accusation when he claims that the total mental state involved in this power is the state of feeling which is used to explain the memory of ideas. This is not an Aristotelian response, but Lotze’s next move is toward a teleological explanation of feeling. The purpose of feeling, he argues, is to convert a consciousness of objects into self-consciousness. This is not the metaphysics of Aristotle’s Hylomorphic phase of theorising. It is rather, reminiscent of medieval contemplation on the nature of substance as a “something” that underlies psychic phenomena. Brett points out that Kant was critical of such an approach. The prevalence of this kind of reflection, however, was such that we find Wittgenstein over 150 years later attempting to continue the fight against the idea of the role of the inner experience of feeling being used for explanatory purposes. What is interesting however is Lotze’s attempt to refer to Doing instead of Being which Wittgenstein would elevate into a level of justification that Lotze would not have approved of because of his commitment to “Science”. Indeed Wittgenstein himself was as committed to Science as Lotze was in his early work “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus” and his movement toward Social Science paralleled the commitment to Action in his later work “Philosophical Investigations.”