Category: History

Views: 1563

Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception” is a work that is intended to fall under many headings but it is undoubtedly, in spite of its limitations, a work of Philosophical Psychology par excellence. The work attempts to synthesise many positions and influences including empirical and rational psychology from a phenomenological/existential point of view. Insofar as its Philosophical credentials are concerned it draws upon the works of Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. In these different syntheses, we find moments in which we are reminded of Aristotelian and Kantian reflections and this is surprising given the fact that Merleau-Ponty(MP) wishes to distance himself from such rationalistic positions.

MP’s account begins with a basic experience of the world that is formed by consciousness: a consciousness of things-in-themselves which it is the task of phenomenology to describe. He takes Descartes and Kant to task for their “analytical reflections” in which the subject is detached from his experience of the world: in this state of detachment the subject, then, stands in judgment upon the world, it is argued. This criticism brings to the fore a formidable philosophical problem of human nature, namely, is man fundamentally in his essence an explorer whose task it is to discover new experiences or a judge whose task it is to explain and justify the proceedings he sees before him in the tribunal of experience.

The judgement in favour of both the explorer and the judge would not be a problem for Aristotle’s Metaphysical Theory of Change and Hylomorphic theory simply because, for Aristotle, powers of judgment are constructed upon explorative powers and simultaneously perform the task of regulating and organising explorative activity. MP sees the judge as separated unnecessarily from the tribunal of experience but the kind of separation that actually exists for both Aristotle and Kant reflects the kind of difference there is between a rational law or principle and what they apply to. It is difficult to take MP’s criticism of Kant seriously if one admits this difference between a principle or a law and what it is applied to. The case against Descartes for the separation of powers (of exploration and judgement), however, is more compelling.

Following the example of Descartes we find MP claiming:

“I cannot put perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by judgements, acts or predications”

Separating perception of a black pen from perceptual judgments such as “This pen is black” does indeed seem a radical move. Descartes and Kant are further accused of separating the inner man from the outer world and it is not entirely clear that this criticism is justified in either case. It certainly is not justified in Kant’s case if one takes into consideration his Anthropological writings and his writings in the realm of Practical Philosophy in which our instrumental and categorical involvements with the world are clearly a result of a type of reflection that is in awe of the world and all its forms and aspects. Kant’s Practical Philosophy is also undoubtedly committed to making the world a better place, however long that process might take for the rational animal capable of discourse.

For MP, discourse is an activity that causes essences to exist in a state of separation from consciousness and this to some extent denies the fact of my consciousness which MP argues, without any recourse to discourse, manages to appreciate the difference between what is imaginary and what is real.

Further “separations” are suggested in relation to Perception when MP argues that although there is a truth or self-evidence rooted in Perception, there is a fundamental difference between what is lived through and what is thought. This separation is sustained by the claim that there is an active operational intentionality( P.XX) in which the “natural and ante-predicative unity of the world and our life” is constituted. From an Aristotelian hylomorphic point of view this exploration of origins by MP may constitute only one kind of explanation of the relevant changing phenomena: it may that is, constitute a preferred phenomenological/archeological reduction at the expense of other types of explanation such as the formal and final kinds of explanation we find in hylomorphic theory. Furthermore, if, as we claimed in the earlier chapters of this work, that Kant was indeed a hylomorphic Philosopher, then the above criticism of Kant would appear to be exaggerated given the Kantian acceptance of all the types of explanation mentioned above.

The target of MP’s Phenomenology is also Science and the Philosophy of Science. MP argues in this context that the scientific concept of causality or causal explanation is problematic because it does not recognize consciousness as the source of what MP calls “the ante-predicative” world. Instead,Science attempts to explain consciousness as a meeting point of a variety of causal agencies in the search for a physico-mathematical law.

What it is that enables MP to move into a transcendental dimension beyond the interplay of causal agencies operating biologically, is a “lived body”. The life of this body is then defined as the use of this body and this is one of the primary constituting factors of both consciousness and its relation to the world. This body is also a transcendental source of the aforementioned operative intentionality that enables me to transcend myself in the use of humanly constructed concrete instruments, e.g. tools to build houses, villages, and cities. Abstract tools such as Language also enable us to construct an orbis pictus in its “transcendental use”. After his work on Perception, Language shifted more and more into the centre of MP’s Philosophising. He did not believe as Wittgenstein did that Language is the “final solution” to all philosophical problems,  but he did claim the following:

“That linguistics would give us the paradigm model on the basis of which we would be able to elaborate a theory of the human sciences and that establish a universal, philosophical anthropology”(“Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans Silverman H.J. Evanston, North Western University Press, 1973, Foreword by James M Edie P.XX))

The relation between body and language is further condensed from the clouds of earlier works in MP’s final work “The Visible and the Invisible”. In this last work written just before his death an Aristotelian bell tolls when he characterises the body as a potentiality of activity. Furthermore, he adds the interesting qualification that this Aristotelian body is structured like a language. This body generates “meaning”, it is claimed. MP had in earlier works characterised meaning in terms of “gestural meaning” and this reminds us of the Evolutionary account of Language presented by Julian Jaynes in Volume one of this work. It is highly unlikely, however, that MP would approve of this kind of “scientific “ treatment of gestural origins and attitudes. In Jaynes’s account the gestural attitude is related to fear and the urgent demands of a life in a state of nature whereas for MP this attitude is more related to the awe and wonder in the face of the world that we find in the works of Aristotle and Kant. For MP the acquisition of language is obviously, then, related to a way of using words that is related to fundamental intentions of speech. These form an attitude that is revealed in the pathological condition of aphasia. Patients suffering from aphasia have lost:

“the general ability to subsume sensory given under a category”(P. 204)

These patients are not capable of what MP calls the categorical attitude. This is not solely a thought function because according to MP language and thought are dual aspects of the same underlying phenomenon or attitude. MP specifically argues that thought does not underlie speech:

“The denomination of objects does not follow upon recognition: it is itself recognition. When I fix my eyes on an object in the half-light and say: “it is a brush”, there is not in my mind the concept of a brush under which I subsume the object, and which moreover is linked by frequent association with the word “brush” but the word bears the meaning, and, by imposing it on the object, I am conscious of reaching that object.”(P. 206)

Speech does not presuppose thought but rather accomplishes it and this is a consequence of an attitude which Freud relied on in his therapy: a therapy called a “talking cure” by one of his patients. It is almost as if primary process thinking which confines itself to the images of experience requires a secondary process—sublimation of these images—in order for the talking cure to have its effect. We also know from the reports of a number of psychologists that children appear to begin to think when they begin to talk. It seems in these cases that naming something gives the thing a form of existence it did not possess previously. The child in this process of language acquisition appears to acquire an ability or power to think according to others. Here the expression of a word is an action in the context of community activity. MP compares this attitude to the Freudian Imago which manifests this emotional  attitudes.

Speech is a modality of Being-in-the-world as is imagination. In the Satrean example of “seeing”(imagining”?) Pierre to be absent from the café what is present to the senses is not a representation nor Pierre himself in person but rather a power of acting toward Pierre that motivates the negative judgement, “Pierre is not in the café”. What is present, MP argues, is, then, a desire to act accompanied by the lack of an intentional structure to realise the power of acting.

An angry word is as much of a gesture as angry behaviour on this account. There is, according to MP, no process of association leading me from the behaviour or the word to a state of anger—my senses and my movements are mutually implicated in this immediate acknowledgment of meaning. There is a non-observational identity here between the angry gesture I witness and the angry gesture I produce in response to an insult. Moreover, according to MP, there is a relativity of the kind of behaviour involved when the Japanese become angry compared to an Italian becoming angry. This suffices for MP to claim that there is a difference in the respective emotions themselves, given the importance of the use of the body at least insofar as this human form of Being-in-the-world is concerned. The use of the body in anger or in discourse, are both transcendent of our biological natures and yet immanent in the process of communication with each other.

MP is not in doubt, at least in his work “Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language”(P. 4) that in language we detect the origins of new kinds of behaviour. This is a work that seeks the laws and principles that pertain to language.

Categorical behaviour rests on a foundation of gesture and is built up within an attitude that will also relate to the truth of language. This is one of the few concessions to Kantian Philosophy that we will find in MP because he insists that the above attitude is more related to the productive imagination than to the Kantian understanding. Internal to this attitude is a recognition of the role of the other that appears to precede the acknowledgment that without truth, discourse can not function between speakers.

Rousseau pointed to “Amour proper” as a key attitude involved in the recognition of others. Hegel pointed to the master-slave dialectic. MP evokes the other person more neutrally but his evocation while originating in the categorical attitude related to awe and wonder, does not embrace the Kantian categories of the understanding, or the Kantian ideas of Reason.

MP insists that Science is merely a second-order activity relating to the primary experience we have of Being-in-the-world. It attempts to “objectify” phenomena with its second-order methods of observation, resolution-composition, and experimentation. Science has an image of a human being as:

“ a physical system undergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by their physico-chemical properties” (P. 12)

In its attempts to characterise perception, science:

“tried to reconstitute actual perception on this basis and to close the circle of scientific knowledge by discovering the laws governing the production of knowledge itself, by establishing an objective science of subjectivity.”(P. 12)

This is obviously a very mechanical and simplistic view of science and it certainly does not serve as criticism of the kind of science we find in the work of Aristotle or Kant. One of the consequences MP wants to draw attention to with this criticism is that it makes my relation to any stimulus a secondary and passive affair—the object impresses itself upon my sensory system in the form of a sensation, and this is in turn then used by the scientist as a unit of experience. This also conflicts with Gestalt Psychology which claims that such a postulated layer of impressions is not to be found in the visual field we perceive. For them, the sensory apparatus is not merely a medium of transmission of units of experience but this apparatus is rather something the body uses to transcend its biological condition. The biological meaning of the situation clearly transcends the physical stimuli perceived. MP accepts all of this and he adds to his criticism of the above observationalist form of science by insisting that the “idea” of a sensation is merely a theoretical construction with no real content—a theoretical construction which will moreover distort any phenomenological analysis of perception. This view of the Scientist asks us to imagine that my visual field is a bundle of sensations, a bundle of particulars. The next problem for such a theory is how to connect this bundle into a whole that is a visual field. This is sometimes attempted with the assistance of a putative law of association. MP rejects this by claiming that the visual field is not formed by association mechanisms but is rather the condition of consciousness associating anything with anything else. Psychologists, he argues, attempt to bolster failing association theory with the claim that the memory facilitates the process by being projected upon the incomplete sense-data of the visual field in order to fill in any theoretical gaps left by the incomplete bundle of sensations. But the problem with this mental-chemistry approach in which sensations plus memory equals visual phenomenon is that there is nothing holding these elements together, no unifying factor for the field of vision.

We also know from history and experience, MP argues, that this form of mental chemistry will never suffice to describe and explain the psychological contribution to cultural phenomena. We can never import such methods into the cultural world where  “atoms” could never replace the meanings of what we experience in this realm. Aristotle too would have objected to the above logical atomism whether it be in the name of perception, language or culture. For Aristotle, it is a mistake to prioritise the contents of perception, language, or culture at the expense of the forms or principles that best explain them. MP to some extent agrees with such criticism when he acknowledges that there are pathological conditions of hysteria that support a more holistic approach to phenomena. Patients suffering from hysteria often turn around to see “if the world behind them is still there”(P. 29)

This is his evidence that perception for these patients has lost the structure of normal perception, a structure in which the normal person knows the world continues behind them even if they cannot see it: without the need of visual confirmation or even the confirmation of memory.

Having thus completed his criticism of empiricist theories, MP then turns to rationalism. Attention, it is argued, is the function of consciousness that enables one to come into contact with what MP calls “the truth of an object”. A piece of wax reveals its essence to the exploring attention miraculously because (for the rationalists) the essence of the wax is already thought and projected onto this piece of extended matter. This account, argues MP, does not acknowledge the phenomenological phenomenon of attention, a phenomenon that possesses the power to constitute a new object from an indeterminate horizon of significance. Rationalism, MP argues, uses the rational operation of judgment to fill in the gap between sensation and perception. Descartes was the rationalist par excellence and we recall well how his wax miraculously did not disappear when all its sensory properties were removed, suggesting, of course, the presence of something rational enabling the wax to continue existing, revealing thus the truth of the wax. Here again, we encounter a form of mental chemistry helping us to construct the truth, namely sensation and judgment. Of course, conveniently for Descartes, the extension of the wax is amenable to quantitative analyses of various kinds and it is thereby rescued from the consuming fires of nihilism.

What we are witnessing here is a radical confusion between two contexts: the context of exploration/discovery and the context of explanation/justification: contexts that require very different logical characterisations.

MP criticises another rationalist, Spinoza, and his notion of “adequate idea”, by claiming that perception, memory, and the existence of others are required to establish the truth of an idea. MP further claims that beginning at the level of the truth of an adequate idea will obscure the phenomena of the World and Others. According to MP, Spinoza has lost the ideas of perception and observation in his account and thereby lost all possibility of describing phenomena. MP would accordingly, balk at our earlier characterisation in volume one of Spinoza as a “proto-phenomenologist”. There is in Spinoza, however, a clear distinction between our mental activity in the context of exploration/discovery where nature rises to the concept and our mental activity in the context of explanation/justification where the concept gravitates toward nature (P.48). There is, for Spinoza, a clear difference between the self that analyses perception in search for an adequate idea, and the self which perceives, perhaps in the process of explaining the adequate idea.

Interestingly MP notes that Rationalism (intellectualism) also chooses to characterise our relation to the world in terms of Sensation thus blocking the path to a phenomenological analysis of Perception. He also seems to suggest that abandoning this notion of Sensation is necessary if one is in search of a new type of reflection and a more sustainable Psychological view of Man. Gestalt Psychology having been praised for its philosophical assertion “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is then questionably criticised for being the hostage of Scientific concepts such as Reason and Cause when it is engaged upon the task of describing and explaining phenomena that are meaningful and motivated.

MP then refers to the Gestalt commitment to Naturalism and this at least sounds justified when one remembers the role the Gestalt psychologists thought the brain played in Perception and Thought. MP is certainly justified in his claim that there is no space for the category of motivation in the naturalistic tendency to describe and explain the role of the brain in our relations with the World and Others. One phenomenon does not “cause” another in the same way in which one neurone causes another to fire. Phenomena are, rather linked by the meaning they have in relation to one another, a meaning that dwells in them in the way in which “operative reason” dwells in the phenomena of Perception. It is this notion of “operative reason” that MP mysteriously appeals to when he finds himself in contexts of explanation/justification.

MP is at his best when he is describing simple perceptual phenomena such as that of a wooden wheel bearing a load or a flame that has burned a child’s fingers. Here, he claims, we have phenomena that are “invested with value”(P. 61). Vital meanings are here expressed. Sensations, MP argues might be able to transmit qualities in sensory experience but they cannot transmit these vital meanings or values. His conclusion here is however questionable. He refers in this context to jettisoning Kant’s work on the categories of judgment that he insists is the connective tissue for phenomena in the Kantian account. This connective tissue, he argues, does not suffice to distinguish phenomena of perception. This is not a correct characterisation of the Kantian position, especially in the light of our earlier characterisation of Kant as a hylomorphic philosopher. If this latter claim is correct then Aristotle’s theory of the emotions (defined by the pleasure-pain principle and related to the imagination) would provide Kant with an account that does not involve the faculty of the understanding(where the categories of judgment are located) but rather involves the faculty of Sensibility. Truth, for Kant, is not located at the level of Sensibility but the concept of Aletheia may be. It should also be pointed out that besides these two primary faculties there is a third, that of Reason, which also assists us in the formation of Transcendental and Metaphysical Judgments. It is at this abstract level that we encounter higher level Principles such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Principle of Non-contradiction. Both of these Principles place limits on what can be said at all levels of description and explanation.

MP claims that it has long been an article of faith insofar as both Science and Philosophy are concerned that Perception somehow puts us in touch with the world and relates us somehow to the Truth about the world. MP prefers to avoid, where he can, such abstract notions and prefers to speak in terms of phenomenal fields. The role of consciousness in this process is quasi-teleological and quasi-archeological: Every instant of the phenomenal field, he claims, is coordinated with future and previous instants as well as Other consciousnesses. He returns to his criticism of Science and insists that scientific concepts relating to theoretical states of bodies, equal and opposite forces, chemical properties of bodies, and geometrical space are based on materialistic and formal presuppositions which seek a Being that only the scientific methods of resolution-composition, observation, and experimentation can reveal. On such accounts, consciousness is a mere suburb of a more extensive empire. In these accounts, the transcendental use of the body is lost in the translation of Being into substantial Being. Expression in the scientific account is resolved into a system of causal relations. Both the values in the world and the Being-in-the-world of expressive beings were resolved and recomposed of parts cleansed of all trace of consciousness and agency: parts that functioned like the parts of a machine. First-person processes were replaced by third person observations, reports, and the activity of experimentation. Both emotional and practical attitudes were subsumed by psychophysiological mechanisms. In the context of this discussion MP, in spite of his arguments against the Sartrean position discussed earlier in this volume uses the Sartrean ideas of en soi (Being-in-itself) and pour soi (Being-for-itself) to accuse the Scientists of locating the realm of their investigations solely in the realm of Being-in-itself. In this discussion, he also accuses the scientist of a form of dualism when they separate the form of their thought from the content of their thinking. This is problematic, MP argues because the empirical concrete self is a mixture of en soi and pour soi. He also predicts that the unholy scientific alliance of naturalism and spiritualism is on the verge of collapsing as a form of Philosophy. In this cauldron of resulting chaos both the physical object and  the spiritual rational self are disappearing:

“ Nature is not in itself geometrical, and it appears so only to a careful observer who contents himself with macrocosmic data. Human society is not a community of reasonable minds, and only in fortunate countries where a biological and economic balance has locally and temporarily been struck has such a conception of it been possible. The experience of chaos both on the speculative ad the other level prompts us to see rationalism in a historical perspective which it sets itself on principle to avoid, to seek a philosophy which explains the upsurge of reason in a world not of its making and prepare the substructure of living experience without which reason and liberty are emptied of their content and wither away.”(P. 65)

The above quote is interesting insofar as its historical perspective is concerned. Both the good Berkeley and Kant pointed out the reasons why nature could not be conceived of as essentially geometrical and Kant further pointed out that practical rationality in the realm of ethical action is best characterised in terms of a context of explanation/justification in which the reasoning precedes from universal ought premises (promises ought to be kept) to a particular ought-conclusion (Jack ought to keep his promise to Jill and pay the money back he owes her).  This is perfectly consistent, Kant argues with the “possibility” of no one in a society being rational and keeping promises. Explanation in a theoretical context of explanation/justification might conceivably concern itself with whether or not we can call ourselves, or our societies rational. After an initial process of exploration we might discover, come to the conclusion that neither we nor our societies are in-themselves rational but are rather created in the spirit of rationality (with the hope that they can become rational—realise their potentiality). All this for-the-sake of leading a rational life in the future. Ethical reasoning on this account is not irrational—it is not irrational in these circumstances to claim that both we, and our societies ought to be rational. Such an investigation might also confirm that it is true that we are animals capable of discourse who as a matter of fact engage in discourse in the agora occasionally demonstrating the power of rationality. The story about Socrates’ exploits in the agora and his subsequent fate is, of course, a story about the fate of rationality in a society not exactly in chaos but certainly an object of concern in the light of the oracular prophecy that “everything created by man is destined to ruin and destruction”. Plato’s concern with just this state of affairs resulted in him writing “The Republic” in which rationality in the form of Philosophers is installed in a government brought about by 3 very theoretical, fanciful waves of change. Aristotle, who acknowledged the animal in us, was not so optimistic and felt that the laws of the city would have to be the vehicle of our rationality. Kant, we should also recall, in the spirit of Aristotle, admitted that man, as a matter of fact, is not rational but he also clearly, in hylomorphic spirit, claimed that we have considerable potential for rationality if the actualisation of various powers of the mind occur. He also bravely predicted a time scale for this event to occur for our societies, ca one hundred thousand years in the future.

MP’s response to the fact that we are not rational was to appeal to a phenomenal field, an “operative reason”, and a conscious body using Perception to reveal a relation to Being. This disclosure of Being, however, is not a self-evident result of the phenomenological method since perception dialectically hides its teleology. In the scientific context of exploration, Consciousness becomes a psychic fact amongst many others and the phenomenological nature of perception is overlooked in favour of the objects in the world that perception “discovers” when sensations fortuitously come together and form an object. The transcendental framework that MP proposes of “Self-Others-World” ought in his view, to replace the above scientific “objective framework”. The Self, in this framework, is a transcendental self—a transcendental ego which:

“is not a Being but a Unity or a Value.”(P.71)

The body is a mixed psycho-physical system for MP and physiology is the discipline we look to for an account its physical nature. Some physiologists, MP argues, have begun to see that there is a complex relation between the physical and the psychological. In the case of certain kinds of physical insults to certain parts of the brain responsible for colour vision we do not see as a consequence any disappearance of “content”: we see rather a disappearance of “form”. This is reminiscent of Aristotle who reminded us that it was the essence, or form or principle of the eye to see—he knew a major insult to the eye would remove the principle of seeing thus confirming the importance of the matter the body is composed of. Similarly, MP points out that in the case of injuries to the certain parts of the brain and sensory conductors what we “discover” is not a disappearance of one colour as in some forms of colour blindness: what occurs is rather a loss of differentiation in the perception of all colours. First, it is the level of saturation of all colours that is effected and the intensity of the colour is diminished. Thereafter the colour-spectrum is reduced to four colours and finally, a monochrome grey is all that can be seen. These psycho-physical phenomena do not operate with reference to single sensations but rather to a patterning of these sensations. Here, MP claims, no causality is operating in relation to sensations. Spinoza would describe this patterning activity in terms of the body attempting to sustain itself in existence. In MP’s account, however, we have no scientific relation of the in-itself with the for-itself but rather a for-itself that constitutes a meaning or value for the physiological organism. Or better, the perspective of Being-in-the-world is what is needed to explain psychophysical phenomena such as a reduction in the perception of colour caused by brain injury. This latter would be the preferred platform of explanation because both the physiological and psychological phenomena are neither in-itself nor for-itself but rather phenomena that are intentionally assimilated in our Being and directed towards the world of facts, values and other persons. In this Being my body is “knowingly” but non-observationally inserted into the world in a way that imposes upon me a view of the world which in turn may allow me to factually see the Church from my window.

One advantage of the above account is that it preserves the integrity of the ontological distinctions related to persons that we find in Kant’s “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”: a dualistic ontology namely of what it is I bring about with the use of my body and what it is that happens to my body. As an infant with limited use of my body, it is probably true to claim that the world largely happens to me. As the infant’s powers increase, however, it becomes truer to say that the body is being put to uses that in turn bring about the happening of events in the world. Of course, on a Kantian account both Understanding and Reason are involved in this latter form of transaction with the world. My purely sensational transactions with the world, on the other hand, must stand on the side of the passive transaction. Sensations are what happens to the body—e.g. the pain at being burned by the live flame of a candle. Explorative perception appears, on the contrary, to be that something that someone is doing, namely using their body to explore their Umwelt or environment. Sensations, as far as Science is concerned, is obviously in some way used in explorative processes. They are used as signs of something. In such use the sensation of pain, for example, in Spinoza´s language, expresses or asserts the sensation of pain and in the case of the burned fingers in the flame the sensation rapidly becomes a part of a sensory-motor complex in which a reflexive withdrawing of the hand rapidly occurs. The question that a Kantian would ask in this context is the following: Is “withdrawing the hand” something that one does or something that happens to one. For a Kantian this is probably something that one does.

MP’s account would probably side with the Kantian but for different reasons that have to do with his idea of the spatiality of the body-image that according to MP is a matter of an existential non-observational form of awareness of the body. Body image is not in this context to be construed in terms of the association of sensations or images. Rather the parts of the body are determined by a whole that encompasses the transcendental purpose of the body. There is, MP would argue, a sensory-motor unity of the body that would explain the intentional withdrawing of the hand in pain from the candle flame.

The Freudian Ego has been likened by some commentators to the Phenomenological Transcendental Ego, and such a position appears to receive further support in the light of the Freudian claim that his Psychology is Kantian. The first function of the Freudian Ego is the protection of the body which for Freud means that the “I think” was definitely present in the intentional act of withdrawing the hand from the flame. On such accounts, the “I” is the principle uniting the representations of the candle-flame and the pain. In this situation, the I thinks what it ought to do and does it immediately. Such action is very similar to the action of a driver turning the wheel of a car to negotiate a curve that immediately presents itself in the visual field—what the driver ought to do and what he does are almost simultaneous. The representations that are transcended in such action are that of the road and that of the sensation of the turning of the wheel. This idea of the spatiality of the body is to be found in Kant’s discussion of space and the incongruent counterparts of a right and left-handed glove.. Here, Kant argues that there is nothing in space itself that guarantees the difference between the spatial orientation of the two gloves. It is rather the difference in the respective intuitions of the respective gloves that accounts for the difference. This explanation of Kant’s would probably be accepted with certain qualifications by MP. For Kant space is an a priori transcendental principle that determines the nature of external spatial relations. MP’s preferred approach to making his transcendental case is to examine pathological cases in which body-image is distorted or lost.. MP insists that in normal cases where body-image is intact, the normal person reckons with “the possible” in terms of possible actions. It is almost as if the thought of what is possible is a necessary prerequisite for the action of the normal person: when for example such a person points at his nose (a relatively abstract movement) or if he is ordered to move his hand. MP criticises the Kantian “I think” as a unifier of diverse representations on the grounds that a representation of the movement to be performed is essentially a sensory and not a motor project or motor intentionality (P. 127). This is a puzzling criticism because MP himself claims that the difference between a normal person and a patient who cannot carry out an order to do something is that in the normal person the movement and consciousness of movement are one unity. Kant is not an associationist, and would not, therefore, claim that there is is an external causal link between the consciousness of the movement and the movement. The “I think” is not “associated” with the manifold of representations, it rather “logically” accompanies, these representations and forms a unity of consciousness. For Kant, the “I think” also includes amongst the manifold of representations the background of the movement which is to carve out its path in a world of possible movements.. MP discusses the patient Schneider, who has sustained brain damage to the occipital lobe of his brain. Schneider cannot recognise an object by merely looking at it and abstract movements such as pointing at his nose are only possible if he keeps his eyes fixed on the arm and hand he is going to use to perform the task. The patient attempts to use observational knowledge to supplement what is left of his normal intentional power. What is missing for the patient is an epistemological attitude or power in which the movements and visual activity give form or structure to the situation (P. 132). The explanations MP searches for both furnish meaning and are only disclosed to a certain kind of reflection. It is clear that in Schneider’s case his deficiency runs deeper than the powers of touch or vision conceived of as collections of sensations or qualities. No explanation is final for this case MP argues.  Visual representation, sensations of touch, and abstract behaviour are merely aspects of one and the same phenomenon: they are three expressions of a disturbance of our fundamental power to organise the world. The above is actually, with certain reservations over the allergic reaction of MP to causation and rationality, a hylomorphic argument for the Aristotelian notion of a power, and could even be appropriately included in the Aristotelian discipline of Practical Science. This power of organising the world for Kant would occur under the auspices of his faculty of Sensibility that would then differentiate into functions of objectification, symbolic functions, representational functions and a function of projection. All of these functions could then on a Kantian account, be involved in a categorical attitude that would be subsumed under Kantian categories of understanding. MP, on the contrary, maintains that consciousness is the central focus of this power and he condenses his opposition to Kant in his characterisation of Consciousness as a power of intentionality and motility(I can”) rather than the Kantian alternative of Thought(”I think”). The “I think” of the Kantian system is the unifier of representations some of which may concern what ought to be done. It was Schopenhauer and not Kant that dualistically divided the world up into the world as Will and the world as Representation. Kant’s division of the practical relations we have with the world through action and the theoretical relation we have with the world through belief is not dualism. Neither does it justify the criticism of MP that Kant prioritises theoretical judgment over practical concrete action. Sensibility functions theoretically in terms of forms of intuition of space and time which are for Kant principles of structuring the world: e.g. “seeing” the ship sailing down the river in terms of before and after in relation to its changing positions in relation to the river. These are not thoughts governed by the categories of understanding but rather sensible relations to the world. One can truly say that insofar as Sensibility is concerned we “inhabit” space and time and we are not representing to ourselves in this context that we are “in” space and time, which incidentally is perfectly possible at the level of understanding and judgment when we are generating knowledge statements. For MP, on the other hand, the sensory-motor functions of a body image are, for some mysterious reason, more fundamental than the representational or symbolic functions. All of these functions contribute in their various ways to the organisation of the world. MP and perhaps Sartre too, prioritise the “I can” over the “I think” which entails seeing the road ahead not in terms of its black tar or its objective relation to other roads and vehicles traveling on it. My “hodological map” as Sartre calls it, grasps the road in terms of my instrumental task of walking along it, its feeling as if it will never come to an end, its unyieldingness beneath my tired feet. In walking along the road I am clearly exploring its potentialities—of coming to an end, of leading to my friend’s house, etc. These are practical tasks that can be expressed by Kantian instrumental imperatives which relate ontologically to Spinoza’s transcendental power of striving to maintain oneself in existence, and perhaps also, insofar as being human is concerned, striving to maintain oneself or create for oneself a qualitative mode of existence that constitutes the Aristotelian state of Eudaimonia (a good-spirited flourishing life). Kant’s response to MP’s criticism would have been to point out that he was the first major philosopher since Aristotle and Spinoza to shift attention away from the theoretical realm to the practical realm of Philosophy. Kant claimed in this context that our moral personality or nature is an important aspect of human Being. Our moral nature, he continued, may even be just as important and perhaps even more important than our explorations of Physical Nature and the truth thereof. Recall the 4 Kantian questions that define the realm of Philosophy: “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” “What can I hope for?” and “What is man?”

MP it ought to be noted is also critical of certain conceptions of an all constituting Consciousness which imputes meaning to everything that lacks meaning under the condition that such a conception does not inhabit a body that acts transcendentally and becomes in the diversity of its acts, a general function.

Kant is criticised for artificially connecting the perception of an object with the perception of space. Space is, MP insists embedded in existence. It is not clear what the thrust of MP’s objection is here but there is a suggestion, equally vague, that Kant’s theory reduces a thing to its space. In relation to this discussion perhaps we should remind ourselves of Kant’s actual position in his Critique of Pure Reason:

“Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead it is subjective and ideal, and originates from mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally.”(Ak2:403)

One of the reasons that, on Kant’s position space could never become thing-like is that causal relations must exist within a thing and in the relation between things. Causality is a function of the understanding and the law that Kant is referring to is not a metaphysical law but rather a transcendental law. Space is an a priori principle or condition independent of experience and could never become thing-like, become a substance that one can attribute attributes to.

For MP space is intimately related to body image and to strengthen his earlier discussion of the Pathological case of Schneider he takes up a more everyday example of a lady with a feather in her hat negotiating obstacles non-observationally in order to avoid damage to the feather. The point of this discussion is to highlight the transformation of the object-feather to becoming part of her body-image. We know from earlier discussions that the use of the body is transcendental for MP. For Leibniz too the body was an effective law of its use but MP rejects this in favour of his formulation “nexus of living meanings”(P.175)

In the work “Phenomenology of Perception,” MP turns to consider “The Body in its Sexual Being”. He acknowledges that there is a certain difficulty attached to rediscovering the relation of the subject to his world by taking into account merely epistemological-metaphysical issues. The task requires taking an original position with respect to the fact that nature is independent of the experiencing subject. This is a nature that does not depend upon being perceived to exist. MP now pins his hopes and arguments on the affective life of sexuality because in this sphere of experience something begins to exist in relation to us through sexual desire and love. Affectivity is therefore an important form of Consciousness for the phenomenologist. Again MP appeals to pathological phenomena, phenomena that are “objectively” examined by empirical and intellectualist psychologists. Neither an account in terms of reflexes nor an account in terms of representations suffice, it is argued by MP, for an adequate explanation of what is occurring in the pathological phenomena he discusses. Sexuality is, rather an intentionality embedded in existence, an intentionality that manifests itself in activity. Freud, that scientific rationalist par excellence is paradoxically quoted favourably in this discussion, in particular, his claim that every human activity including dreaming has a meaning.

On the issue of the body, however, MP rejects Freudian references to genital organs and erotogenic zones when it comes to explaining  Sexuality as a phenomenon. For MP Sexuality as a phenomenon is a general power of the psychosomatic subject, a power that creates meaningful structures of conduct, and a power that has internal links to both our cognitive and active natures.

We know from earlier chapters in this work that Freud’s work was conceived of as “archeological” insofar as another phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur, was concerned. Ricoeur means by this term that there is in Freud a desire to return historically to the origins of things in the process of explaining their meaning. This, from an Aristotelian point of view, is merely a commitment to one form of causal explanation that we know neither MP nor Ricoeur is in favour of. Claiming, in the context of this discussion, as MP does, that sexuality does not have an intimate relation to the genitals when it is so apparent that the genitals are the focus of so much attention and representation is to say the least a paradoxical claim. Freud, as we know traces the history of the movement of erotic sensitivity and stimulation from the mouth to the anal zone to the phallic region, all before the age of 6. The whole investigation is Aristotelian and conducted under the auspices of the Aristotelian pleasure-pain principle thus avoiding the modern biological tendency to reduce all activity to reflexivity or a “ blind” form of instinct. Images, which are representations are key components of sexual activity, These images are also related to pleasure and pain and connected fundamentally to erotic zones of the body. Freud is undoubtedly a hylomorphic Psychologist and this is evidenced by his choice to found his whole mature Psychology on what he calls a “mythology” of instincts and their vicissitudes. Instincts and their vicissitudes (which include Consciousness) are regulated by three principles: the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP), the Pleasure-Pain Principle(PPP), and the Reality Principle(RP). This does not mesh with the account MP gives of the libido where he specifically declares that the libido is not an instinct. In making this statement it is not clear whether he also meant to deny that it was a vicissitude of an instinct. Freud’s response to this claim of MP’s would probably have been to claim that Instinct is merely a general power of the body, a power that reaches deep into our Being-in-the-world. We should not, however, be surprised at these paradoxical criticisms of Freud, considering MP’s attitude toward the work of Kant. We have pointed out previously that many problematic interpretations of Kant rest upon an ignorance of the fact that he was to some extent, a hylomorphic philosopher.

MP, in elaboration upon sexuality and its relation to our existence,  shows the resemblance of their positions when he asserts that :

“all existence has a sexual significance…every phenomenon has an existential significance.”(P.184)

This is highly suggestive of the Freudian position and MP continues to elaborate upon this point by referring to the sexual sectors of our life. In the context of this discussion, MP cites the case of a woman who has lost the use of speech in response to a parental prohibition forbidding her to see the man she loves. This obviously suggests, MP maintains, the oral phase of psycho-sexual development but it is a phase the patient regresses to as a consequence of the traumatic prohibition. Any in-depth analysis will no doubt reveal the work of the pleasure-pain principle operating in the defense mechanism of regression in this patient. This together with the truth that “Trauma disrupts normal psychological functioning” helps us, then to give an “interpretation” in terms of intentionality. There is here, an intentional refusal of the life of discourse with others, returning the patient to the kind of existence an animal enjoys. In refusing to eat (another symptom) the patient is also intentionally demonstrating the presence of Freud’s Death Instinct (opposed to the life-sustaining libido). MP fails to mention this aspect of the analysis that Aristotle would have no objections to. It is true that sexuality appears to be present in this case only in outline (in the regression to the oral phase and the implied sexual deprivation brought about by the prohibition) but its presence is essential to the thesis that MP wishes to defend. It is clear that in more general terms the patient’s body loses a whole range of powers when fields of possibility relating to speaking and eating are closed down. Yet the patient survives in virtue of the presence of the libido that at any moment might resume an interest in the world of possibilities it knows and can see. Existence, for MP, is not a set of facts but rather the source we have for metamorphosing these facts.

MP also claims that existence is ambiguous and returns to our relation to the natural world to illustrate the transcendence of the body. He argues that ambiguity is present even in the most basic sense experience of the colour of blue which for MP is not a sensation or a quality but rather is to be analysed in terms of the transcendental use of the body. The body prompts me to look at blue in a particular way and when I do so it reverberates in the whole of my body and disposes it toward a feeling of slipping downwards. In Aristotelian terms, blue is a form that will have certain effects upon the form of the body in the context of certain “causes” in the world including lighting conditions. The water and waves of the sea and the expanse of the sky may look blue but they are really white being endowed with colour by the lighting conditions of the interaction of the golden sun with the darkness of space. This “effect” of blue upon the perceiver could be just as real as the effects of the golden sun or the darkness of space. The effect also for Aristotle causes the body to respond in a certain way. This phenomenon may well require the entire structure of Aristotle’s metaphysics of change for a complete account which subsequent modern experiments with prisms confirmed. Light is white and one of the colours produced by prisms is blue indicating that white light and darkness are primary conditions of our colour system. Further modern quantitative experimentation with colours also indicates that there is a continuum of colours that can be measured in units. Certain measurements, however, may not conform to the colour system as we perceive it: certain measurements, for example, are not perceivable by the naked eye. If this is an indication of the structure of reality (that it is an infinite continuum) ,then, Kant’s metaphysical contention that we can know very little about this Reality as it is in itself finds some support. This reality can manifest itself in an infinite number of forms including the forms of time and extension and this may be a source of ambiguity for Kant but for the MP of “Phenomenology of Perception,” this position is mistaken because for him there is no noumenal reality behind phenomena.

In an attempt to authenticate his view of the transcendent use of the body and its Being-in-the-world, MP chooses to focus upon an experimental phenomenon in which the whole world appears to the perceiver to be upside down and lack “Reality”. He cites an experiment by Stratton in which an image of the world projected upon the eye is inverted, thus creating the sense in his subjects that the world is upside down. Initially, nothing is recognisable, not even faces which completely lose their familiarity when seen upside down. Eventually, as the subjects are forced to engage with this world by finding their way and doing things, (whilst the image remains inverted), the world returns back to its normal state of orientation. Is this, then, the confirmation that MP seeks to prove, namely that the use of the body is transcendental? MP claims that in the initial phase of the inversion of the image no mere conceptualisation of the world or intellectual attempt to merely identify things in the world would produce the same effect of returning orientation to normal. Merely thinking about the visual field would not, he argues, produce a correction of the orientation belonging to the visual field.

For MP the body’s relation to space is a living one but he adds mysteriously that there is a level of space behind the space the body constitutes. This is a mysterious claim given his consistent opposition to the position which maintains that the conditioned we experience always has logical conditions which the Principle of Sufficient Reason requires we investigate.

MP makes clear that the body he is referring to is not a personal body but rather one that is “ a system of autonomous functions”(P.296). These functions constitute its general project that is, as he puts it, “a communication with the world more ancient than thought”. These functions and this project are not, he argues, accessible to reflection and it is not clear what is meant with this statement. He certainly cannot subscribe to equating what he is saying with the Kantian noumenal self that is revealed in categorical ethical actions. The project that man is, is “invaded by the outside”(P.370) , to use MP’s terms. The object in the noumenal world, for him is merely a phenomenon formed as a result of the unity of sense provided by a transcendent body. This project is in typical existential fashion thrown into the natural world, which can only be explored in terms of inter-sensory relations that cannot be captured by formal mathematical or scientific thinking. The way in which transcendence enters the system from the outside is via the perception of Others. Other people’s perspectives on landscapes we will never see, creates a continuous chain of experience that may extend into infinity.

Sometimes this continuity and reality of the perceived world are ruptured as is the case with Macbeth’s hallucination of a dagger hanging in the air, and the ghost of Banquo at the feast. MP claims that hallucinations are neither sensory experiences nor judgements. They are for him enigmatic forms of consciousness. This strangeness is illustrated by a considering a report by a schizophrenic that there is a bird in the garden singing but the fact of the bird and the fact of its singing seem not connected to each other. Here is appears, from a Kantian point of view that the structure of judging something about something has collapsed into the simpler power of merely “thinking” something. This thinking moreover does not respond or connect to either logic or what Wittgenstein would call the grammar of language and seems rather to be conducted in the medium of projected images. MP’s diagnosis is that the inter-sensory unity of the birds singing has fallen apart. He sticks at this description and refuses to think hylomorphically about this phenomenon, which would entail accepting a “causal” account of powers building upon powers. For Aristotle, there are many ways in which the normal structures constituting man- the rational animal capable of discourse- can fall apart. For Kant, the problems are with the faculty of Sensibility and the power of the imagination to “construct” our normal world. When the power of the imagination is isolated from the powers of perception, understanding, and reason we are then confronted with enigmatic phenomena. The accounts of Aristotle and Kant would amount to nothing more than what he would call “mental chemistry”.  This objection by MP, however, would be rejected, in turn, by both Aristotle and Kant, on logical and conceptual grounds.

The General Project that we are includes Consciousness that, according to MP does not know what it is doing when it is hallucinating. This must amount to some kind of negation of the transcendental use of the body. There is a mysterious defense of this position that relates to the possibility that there is a possible hiatus in relation to the time between one act of consciousness and another. It is this that allows consciousness to doubt itself. MP argues. (P402). This  “anything is possible” last resort of the skeptic does, however, seem to be a controversial explanation of a phenomenon that appears to require, at least insofar as Freud (the Kantian Psychologist) is concerned, more analysis and justification.

This theme of the precarious hold that Consciousness has on the past and the future is continued, and MP claims that “the transcendence of the instants of time is both the ground of and the impediment to, the rationality of my personal history”(P. 404).

Being thrown into the world as a general project, testifies to the general fact that the powers of my body (to use Aristotelian language) are anonymously integrated into an anonymous life. Spinoza would have characterised this state of affairs in terms of his  “first idea of the mind”, namely “the idea of the body”. This body lives in the natural world of Aristotle, a world composed of earth, air, water, and fire conditioned by the processes of hot and cold, wet and dry which as we know in certain combinations can produce both a Shakespearean Tempest and also the calm before and after the storm. We also live in the Aristotelian cultural world of arête in which three kinds of forms are transmitted in Time: the reproduction of children, the reproduction of artefacts, and the reproduction of ideas. The cultural landscape of houses, villages, cities, fields, roads, churches bells, hammers and anvils overlay the natural landscape of the hills and valleys. MP claims that each of these cultural kinds of object is formed after the human action it is created for. He uses the Hegelian term of Objective Spirit to describe the cultural presence in the scenery we have just described. We sense, he argues, the presence of Other persons in the form of a general I. The question he then asks himself is whether his Consciousness can in fact think this general I, or a general “One”. In a sceptical recital he claims that all we in fact see are detached projects constituted of the thoughts and intentions of transcendent bodies. This introduces the challenge that Sartre met with his eavesdropping example. Sartre argues that I become aware of the gaze of another accusing me. In this spirit of shame and injustice, I encounter others. Rousseau responds to the challenge of Other persons by claiming that we encounter others in a spirit of “amour proper”. Hegel responds to the challenge in the spirit of his raw master-slave relation. MP slips into Sartre’s characterisation of the problem of Other Minds by re-iterating that the Other person is both in-itself and exists for-itself. The ambiguity of this description implies, MP argues, that I have an apparent choice to treat the Other person as either an object or as a Consciousness.

MP rejects all scientific accounts in which the body is placed in a Spatio-temporal continuum of the world as a centre of movement and activity to be measured by a system of physico-mathematical correlations. He does this because, as he puts it, there is nothing in this kind of account allowing us to conceive of the inhering of Consciousness in a transcendental body. Such accounts do not allow the attribution of Consciousness either to myself or to Others. Scientists faced with the challenge of Consciousness or Others sometimes slip into a form of dualism in which they agree that Consciousness can inhere in my body on Cartesian grounds (namely that I know that I think). Having established such a position they are then forced to resort to any number of logical contortions to attribute Consciousness or Minds to others. Aristotle the scientist is not a dualist and yet is able to describe and explain the functions of the body, and the structure of powers that enable us to transcend our merely physical natures. In Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory, the organ system of a human body contains the principles necessary for a life that is captured in his hylomorphic definition: rational animal capable of discourse. Powers building systematically upon powers and powers integrating themselves with other powers generate an ability to transmit the forms of children (with long childhoods compared to the animal world), the forms of artefacts, and the forms of ideas, the essential components of our cultural world. For MP, however, any mention of physiology or physiological events is merely an abstract schema of concrete phenomena.

It is clear that for MP, the gaze of the other whilst being a trace of Consciousness has a distinctly Sartrean character. The gaze is responded to as an alien existence that I “re-enact”. I know of the existence of Other persons because MP argues, I am not transparent to myself. Presumably, this means that we are not fully aware of all aspects of the functions of our bodies: the workings of the organs (including the brain) for example. MP rules out the idea that we become an object for the Other, and the idea that he becomes an object for me. He is in the world as I am, and neither of us is shut up in their perspective. When the other is engaged in instrumental action involving objects, his activity is both a mirror of mine yet adds some further significance. It is clear that on this account the world is no longer mine, it belongs to the general I, or One. I know that the body over there, making use of the world has the same structure as mine. The intentions that are being enacted “over there” are products of the same structure. Just as the parts of my body form a whole: Others pursuing their business in the world also form the whole of this general “One”.  I, and Others can engage in discourse and when that happens our thoughts form a single fabric of thought: the language used to accomplish this is the Language of the anonymous “One”. This might be an account of the world we could find in the work of the ancient Greeks. This common world of the general “One” was both maintained and improved by the spirit of arête(doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) and the telos of arête, for the Greeks, was the common good(The Platonic “Form of the Good”, the Aristotelian “principle”).

The tenor of MP’s reflections is sometimes difficult to fathom because there is a distinctive shift from analytic scepticism to a more neutral Heideggerian view of Being in which our Being-in-the-world is an issue for us. This latter position would to some extent accommodate Aristotelian and Kantian attitudes in which we experience awe and wonder in the face of the natural world and our own Being.

In an interesting discussion of Piaget MP claims that even if the child at 12 reaches an understanding of what he calls the truths of rationalism, underlying this achievement are earlier forms of mentality and it is these forms that are primarily of interest to MP because:

“My awareness of constructing an objective truth would never provide me with anything more than an objective truth for me”(P.414)

This can be construed as an expression of transcendental solipsism. It implicitly denies a number of the major premises of hylomorphism in which it is claimed, for example, that a de-centering operation occurring in us as powers build upon and integrate with other powers is part of an actualisation process connected to rationality. This decenering operation then results in, or is transcended by, a common world in which we participate in a spirit of areté. The problem of other minds does not manifest itself in such accounts (Piaget’s and Aristotle’s) MP, however, given his scepticism over “causation” would see in these reflections reference to the purely analytic components of the body and behaviour which without the presence of a general project would never result in the general I. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would, however, accept such a description as relevant to their accounts because for them both the structure of the body (its organs and limbs) and the use to which these are put in behaviour are conceptually connected with the state and structure of our minds. Skeptical recitals that fail to consider conceptual and logical connections end in the paradoxical position of claiming, for example, that we can never know what another person is thinking because we only see their body behaving. Such sceptical recitals also raise the earlier question concerning the skeptical appeal to the consciousness of time in relation to hallucinations.

MP would, however, claim that he has good grounds to insist that we can directly see the anger and grief in the behaviour of others because the emotions obviously are conceptually identifiable through bodily reactions and behaviour. True, it can be maintained, that my grief and anger is mine and his belongs to his consciousness on the grounds that my grief and anger are lived through and his is merely out there on display in a scene in the theatre of the world. MP points out that if Pierre is grieved because Paul has lost his wife Paul is grieved at the fact of Pierre’s grief and their grief is therefore different because the objects of their grief are different. Yet surely, one could respond, there is a concept of grief that comprises a state of mind, bodily reactions, behaviour and relevant worldly circumstances if the emotion is to be fully characterised. If this is the case then a suitable combination of the above factors could be judged universally to be grief.

MP’s flirtation with solipsism continues when he boldly asserts that solipsism is grounded in a living experience in spite of an acknowledgment that my sensory-motor functions and cultural objects, institutions, and works in the world around me are not mine. The fact that it is I that experience all these things suffices for MP to make a claim for the truth of solipsism. Every Other, for example, must, he continues, be experienced by me in order to exist for me. The fundamental Cartesian fact that I am given to myself and the fact that every experience is a particular experience that refuses generalisation, is sufficient for MP to defend this uniquely popular 20th -century position (adopted by Husserl, Heidegger, the early Wittgenstein, William James, etc.)

What looked to be a final position is then metamorphised in a later elaboration in which MP argues that a subject’s Being-in-the-world guarantees activity that must assume the existence of Others. It is now argued that the social world is a form of existence that I live. It is admitted that a fundamental contradiction is involved in this ambiguous stance and it becomes clear even to MP that this position cannot be sustained via a pure phenomenology of description. We need, it is argued, a phenomenology of phenomenology that returns us to the Cogito and a “logic” of lived meaning (which presumably thinks that contradictions are acceptable). MP accepts the inconstancy of this position and claims that this “logic” will only have what he calls a “relative validity”

So how will MP characterise this Cogito? In a Cartesian way? We should recall in this context that Descartes in a meditating, Heraclitean mood found no problem in thinking away the transcendental power of the body. He then paradoxically characterises the return of things and ideas to the self as “final truth”. But this final truth is a truth related to consciousness and not thought because thought is opaque to itself in the sense that it is the end of a process that arbitrarily suspends further questioning. Thought must on this account be a consciousness of thinking. This, MP argues, is the reason why Descartes felt compelled to attach to certain thoughts the qualities of clarity and distinctness, thereby making these thoughts immune to sceptical doubt. These thoughts are self-evident and differ from evident thoughts insofar as they are not challengeable. “I think therefore I am” must be immune to doubt if one can prove the premise, “I think” and the question is whether Descartes manages to do this in his “test”. This test takes the following form: Try to doubt that you are thinking and then ask yourself what you were doing when you were doubting. The only reasonable answer to this is that you must have been thinking. The methodical doubt of Descartes does have a reservation over the self-evidence of this conclusion and resolves this with an appeal to God. Descartes asks himself whether we can be deceived into thinking that we are thinking and answers in the negative because God would have to be malevolent and capable of deception if this was the case.

One reading of Descartes is that his proof guarantees only the fact that I am thinking and not the truth of my thoughts. If doubting always presupposes this act of thinking then at least this leaves no logical space for the doubting sceptic to cast doubt upon thinking by questioning the truth of the thought. Descartes´ method also, as we have mentioned, inconveniently for MP, doubted the body of the thinker leaving no logical space for an account of the transcendental body. For Descartes, the movement of the body was a mechanical affair and could be characterised in the way we characterise the moving parts of a machine.

MP does not criticise Descartes in the above terms but he does take him to task for not giving an account of the role of language in our Being-in-the-world. MP claims that in reading the Meditations on the Cogito we focus on the words and are carried beyond them in a world of thought. Descartes words express their meanings but neither words nor their meanings are the creation of consciousness (because meanings are not images—the language of hallucination?). Meanings are rather motor significances of the words. Wittgenstein in his later Philosophy will appeal to the use of words that he claims in many philosophical discussions serve to bewitch the intellect with hallucinatory meanings. For Wittgenstein it was vital to his account that the use of language is not merely an empirical phenomenon but rather something transcendental that provides us with the norms of representation—provides us, that is, with rules that representations follow. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, we are rule-following animals.

Words are not norms for MP, they are gestures. We begin by imitating and thereby understanding the gestures of Others (so surely they must exist—to use an ancient argument of Socrates). A word is pronounced in certain circumstances and I imitate this phenomenon and suddenly almost magically I have grasped the meaning of the word. Indeed, learning the word “Blue” for Wittgenstein would be a part of a form of life in which one surveyed or manipulated the circumstances to find something blue to point to (an “abstract” movement for MP) and then uttering the word ”Blue!” whilst adopting an imperative attitude. The pupil then demonstrates that he has grasped the rule for the use of this word by uttering it in relation to all appropriate circumstances when called upon to do so. My wonder in the face of the blue of the sky or sea is thus converted into rational discourse. Here arête amounts to saying the right thing at the right time in the right way. MP claims that language presupposes a silent consciousness of language, whatever that means. In this silent “space” words are given their meaning and form, but again we are asked to consider the solipsistic truth “myself experienced by myself”(P.469) which is then conveniently converted into the formulation “oneself experienced by oneself”(P.470) This “silent consciousness” is then characterised in terms of the formulation “One thinks”. This formulation may be as close as MP comes to defining the general project that we are. The project can also be described in terms of action, i.e. “One can”, a characterisation in which intentions and expectations enter into relation to our action. Here we can assume that the transcendental use of the body which “One can” refers to, obviously includes the use of language, i.e. “one can speak”. This capacity appears to have transcendental significance in the Phenomenology of MP.

In his analysis of temporality, MP makes an Aristotelian move by criticising the use of the term “events” and the division of a whole phenomenon into parts that are events. The river which is fed by glacial ice melting yesterday and contains the piece of wood I threw into the glacial melt-water today will discharge into the sea tomorrow. Science prefers to reduce this holistic phenomenon into three “events” in order to postulate causal relations between them, the events, namely of the past, present, and future. Aristotle would have refused such a resolution and atomisation of the phenomenon of the river and time. For Aristotle, we are dealing with forms or principles that enable us to both describe and explain what we are experiencing. We are, in the above example, clearly experiencing the motion of the river and this motion can be measured in terms of before and after. Any further change such as the change of the rate of the discharge will, in turn, change any other form it comes into contact with, e.g. the levels of the river might rise. Throwing a piece of wood into the river is a human action and will produce no significant change to the river level but if thrown into the glacial melt-water it might serve (like language?) as a “sign” or symbol of a section of the water which contains this melt-water. In turn, the river discharging into the sea will be best described in terms of the form of the river interacting with the form of the vast ocean whose level will not rise significantly with the discharge of the river. There are clear analogies between the river and time, e.g. both “flow” in one direction. This directionality has consequences for particular changes that have happened in the past. They may be no more: the glacial melt-water like the wine poured into the sea soon disperses in the vast ocean and loses form and may not be identifiable as a theme of discourse unless of course a chemist with vast resources is put to work to “find” the wine or the melt-water. The piece of wood floating in the sea may be used as a “marker” for his investigations.

According to Aristotelian ontology, the river remains the same river even if completely new water from rain in the low-lying hills is now the source. For Aristotle, the principle or form of the river is not identical with the water but rather with the role that the river plays in the communities it effects in different ways. It remains relatively stable through its changes in its course and geographical location and this suffices for the principles of metaphysics to apply, namely that which a thing changes from(a river filled with glacial melt-water from the mountains), that which a thing changes to(a river filled with rainwater from the hills) and that which endures throughout the change, namely the river with its stable course and stable geographical location.

MP is not happy with the claim that we analogously maintain that time is flowing or passing and believes this is a confusion based on a misunderstanding that a river is a flowing substance. The above Aristotelian tale is meant to question this claim. For Aristotle, a river is not merely a flowing substance. It is rather something stable like an a priori form of the sensory mind (Time) which can measure the change in the world with the help of instruments of culture such as counting(maths) or clocks(engineering or IT) or calendars(publishers, programmers). According to Kant, without the mind being structured in the way in which it is, Time would be nothing. All this amounts to is that in any possible world in which human minds did not exist there would not be Time as we know it. Such a world may contain birds building nests and squirrels storing nuts for the winter but such animals would never be aware of the passing of time in the way in which we are, or sit by the river and ponder on the directionality of Time.

MP, when he speaks of causation does so in terms of “pushing”—the past pushing the present, and the present pushing the future into Being, but this is a linear physically mechanical view of causation that pales in comparison with the complexity of Aristotle’s 4 kinds of “causes” or aitia (explanations). If there were no living beings at all in the possible world we constructed in the above thought experiment, the whole world would not exist as MP claims as a large number of “nows”, simply because “now” is logically connected to “not now” which of course presumes a humanly constructed form of time in terms of past-present-future. “Not now” could be either in the past or in the future. What ought we to say about Time in our constructed world without humans? Newton claimed that in such a world there would be an absolute time that would “flow”. Without going into all the complexities of such a conception let us cut a long story short and merely agree with Kant that such a world would be composed of things-in-themselves changing in accordance with principles-in-themselves about which we could have no knowledge whatsoever. In short, there would be change in such a world but no time. Whether that change would “flow” in all cases of change, is doubtful.

MP does then admit that such a world would be, as he puts it, “too much of a plenum for there to be time” but he would not accept the above Aristotelian or Kantian reasoning with respect to Time. For MP, and possibly for Husserl too, Time is a passage of change and a network of intentionalities unified by a continuity of befores and afters. The plenum of Being referred to above is ruptured by the perspective of a subjectivity and an operative intentionality of a general nature. When he discusses action directed toward an end, MP speaks in terms of a “transitional synthesis” that takes place in the comprehensive project of life. The role of consciousness in this context is that it is in flux in a process or activity of temporalization.  Involved in this process or activity is a transitional synthesis between the “nows” of experience: a synthesis that creates a duration of time. According to MP, the world flows through me in this continuous wave of temporalization. When this wave ceases for me, the time of the world of Others who are alive continues. In a certain sense Time is a great equalizer because Other persons will never feel the wave of temporalization that I feel, and because of this, MP controversially argues, they are “lesser figures”(P. 503). But when the wave ceases in me and I die, Time continues to express itself in their waves of temporalization.

In the final chapter on Freedom MP eschews all forms of causal explanation in relation to the body of the subject or his society/world. This is part of a larger crusade against objectification that is a type of characterisation that is especially irrelevant insofar as Consciousness is concerned. I cannot, it is argued, categorise myself as a “lesser figure” merely because I am old or crippled. If anyone does so they are not genuinely complaining about themselves but merely comparing themselves with others. In their minds, they are aware that the state of one’s body is the price one pays for Being-in-the-world. My freedom, it is argued, cannot be determined by these categorisations and causal factors and I can never be “categorised” until that moment when death is upon me and freedom and consciousness have left my body. Interestingly it should be noted that we are formally and officially pronounced “dead”. When this has happened Science can bring causality (cause of death) and categorisation to bear upon a person. Consciousness has not a nature and cannot, therefore, be categorised. If one thinks of oneself as middle class or as a working-man, for example, this is merely a second-order perspective upon a self where the first order of Being for consciousness is as an anonymous and unqualified source of change. If I become a working-man it is in virtue of a way of existing in relation to institutional frameworks such as economic and government systems. The existential project that we all are, polarises consciousness toward certain operative intentionalities that posses an enigmatic telos. Regarding oneself as a working-man is then a decision: my freedom can, if with difficulty, have the power to commit my life elsewhere. I can identify myself as middle class and commit myself to a class journey that has a very uncertain outcome. At the end of this discussion, we once again encounter MP wanting not to take a position with respect to the issue of freedom versus determinism, claiming that we “exist in both ways at once”(P.527). This choice he claims is only a dilemma if one is committed to the objectification of Being.

The more mature MP, in his work “Signs”, moves his position closer to hylomorphism. He claims that in the 20th century the distinction between body and mind has ceased to exist. Furthermore, he claims that the 19th-century notion of a body as a network of causally interacting mechanisms was being replaced by the idea of a “lived body”. If this is correct it might be an argument for a resurgence of Aristotle’s thought. In this context, he claims, rightly, that he can discern a “journey” in the work of Freud from the 19th-century medical view of the body to a concept of an “experienced” body. It should be pointed out in the interest of being historically correct that whilst practicing medicine in his early years Freud was already rebelling against an established dogma of somato-genesis(the cause of mental illness is in the body) and moving philosophically in the direction of psychogenesis(the cause of mental illness resides in the psyche). Also, his earlier experiments with hypnosis are difficult to characterise accurately but he did believe that ideas communicated via hypnosis could both remove and install symptoms. The role of Language in the process of hypnosis is often overlooked in favour of Freud’s reason for abandoning this method, namely that the patient was not freely and consciously participating in the treatment process: treatment for Freud needed to attack more than the symptom and attempted rather to find the cause of the malady. Freud’s concept of cause is not taken up in MP’s essay “Man and Adversity” but it must be questionable, whether this Aristotelian/Kantian category could be accepted by the early MP, given his opposition to Scientific Psychology and Kantian Philosophy. The root of the problem lies in a partial rejection of hylomorphic theory. Whether this rejection is a conscious intentional decision is an issue difficult to resolve.

 In this essay, however, there is an interesting characterisation of the concept of instinct:

“If the term Instinct means anything, it means a mechanism within the organism which with a minimum of use ensures certain responses adapted to certain characteristic situations of the species.”

We know that Consciousness was one of the vicissitudes of the Instincts in Freud’s work, so the above characterisation is problematic. Becoming Conscious, as Freud put it, is a task set by man’s nature and this process is not certain in the sense that other instinctual vicissitudes might dominate a human being’s development. Freud’s later use of mythical terminology is also an argument against the biological view of Instinct presented. Eros and Thanatos, for example, are active figures. Eros energises sexual intentions together with other forms of creative and unifying intentions that, for example, create our houses, villages, cities, nations. These latter cultural activities operate with a force that is embodied in instrumental action undertaken in the spirit of Ananke. MP admits that Freud in fact distanced himself from all mechanical views of Instinct with the claim that all human behaviour and psychical activity have “meaning”. In the context of this discussion, however, MP specifically dismisses means-ends and matter-form categorisations. Neither of these concept pairs is relevant, he argues, for attempting to articulate the relation of the body to life as a whole. He ends with a mysterious and problematic dualistic claim that the mind passes into the body and vice versa. The more appropriate characterisation of Freud’s theorising, especially in its later stages involves seeing the hylomorphic aspects in which differentiation of life-forms give rise to powers of increasing complexity: powers which actualise over time, given appropriate circumstances. In this process, a life form with certain powers can be said to be conscious(but not by Aristotle: consciousness is a modern term). This is a life form with higher powers and can as a consequence be said to possess higher mental processes such as the power of discourse and rationality (manifestations of the Freudian Reality Principle). Organisms with fewer powers use their powers in accordance with other principles: the energy regulation principle(ERP) or pleasure-pain principle(PPP). These two principles also regulate activity in the Unconscious and preconscious regions of the mind that include the agencies of the Id, the Ego, and Superego. Eros for Freud is a civilisation building vicissitude of an Instinct. If we are right in maintaining that Freud was a hylomorphic Psychologist than we can link erotic activity not just with reproduction of offspring via sexual activity, but also with reproduction of artefacts (houses roads etc.) via instrumental imperatives, and also with reproduction of ideas via categorical imperatives.

The interplay of the life instincts and death instincts are not in Freud confined to the activity of a transcendentally solipsistic individual. Reproduction of artefacts and ideas is not the same as sexual reproduction but there nevertheless is a world-building intention behind each of these forms of activity that we can attribute to the interaction of Eros and Ananke. Freud noticed, being a Jew in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, that humans are quite often aggressive and this is a destructive tendency which if widespread or universalised (as in war) has the potential to destroy civilisations. War is a work of aggression and is unlike the reproductive activity of sexuality, or the reproduction of artefacts and ideas. MP misses the characteristics of a Freudian strong Ego, namely to love and to work probably because they are Aristotelian features of the life of rational animals capable of discourse. Aristotle did not have the “new men” to contend with that Kant and Freud did. Kant, we know characterised ordinary life in his cosmopolitan Königsberg as melancholically haphazard and Freud certainly pulled no punches in asking the question whether the work we put into the maintenance and creation of civilisation is worth the effort. For the “new men” had created the material he needed to write “Civilisation and its Discontents”, a work written almost on the eve of destruction of the second attempt to destroy the world. MP writing amidst the ashes of the aftermath claimed Marxism as his preferred Political Philosophy. The humanism of Aristotle and Kant were eclipsed in this terrible 20^th century(Hannah Arendt) and it must be said that MP assisted in the process of furthering the cause of the “new men” by Philosophising in the darkness of the eclipse.