Category: Philosophical Publications and Book Reviews

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When Psychology separated itself off from Philosophy in 1870 the major articles of divorce concerned methodology and the scope and limits of Psychological Theory. In Germany the focus was on structuralism and the search for basic structures, but in the USA William James embraced the opposing position of Functionalism based on a concept of “pure experience” and what he called “The pragmatic method”. Wundt, the Structuralist, settled for the definition of Psychology as “The Science of Consciousness” whilst James was moving away from the experimental method of Science and the structuralist substantive idea of Consciousness. Pragmatism and “Radical Empiricism” were the tools James was using in his attempt to establish “experience” as the foundation stone of all psychological theorising. His definition of Psychology was: “The Science of Mental Life, its phenomena and conditions”. This definition, given a broad conception of Science might have been one which both hylomorphic(Aristotelian) and critical(Kantian) Philosophers alike may have accepted as a starting point for their anthropological reflections. James was also very aware of the research that was occurring on the Continent of Europe and he was eager to tie the threads of many theories together under the heading of “Principles of Psychology”. His empiricism was radical because it refused to rest upon a theory of Humean and Lockean ideas and impressions being connected together by the “mechanism” of association, preferring instead to search for the conditions of a functional phenomenon such as memory. Radical Empiricism also dismisses spiritual reifications of the soul that regard the soul as a substance manifesting the presence of various faculties such as Memory. One of the conditions of the function of memory results in the claim that, firstly, the senses must be affected in some way and in turn affect the functioning of the brain. This reminds us of the Freudian Scientific Project in which one system of neurones (phi-system) are not changed in the process of their innervation and another system of neurones(psi-system) in which the neurones are chemically changed in the process of innervation(e.g. in memory). The latter system is connected with the preconscious memory system that records the effects of learning in the neurone system. The Psychologist, James argues, in the spirit of the early Freud, must be a nerve physiologist. James also notes in this context that when mental states are conditioned by bodily processes, the investigation of this must lead back to the body and its activity, perhaps to the phenomenon of voluntary deliberate action. The mechanical explanation of the movement of inorganic objects such as iron filings toward a strong magnet differs from explanations for living movement which are, James suggests, more complex. Romeo, James argues, is an example of a living organism that possesses a mental life. When in the course of this short life he chooses to overcome all obstacles in the way of his love for Juliet, he is exercising a freedom and intelligence that cannot be found in the determinate relation between the iron filings and magnet. James then proposes a criterion for the identification of organisms possessing a mental life:

“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment.”

(Principles of Psychology, Volume one, New York, Dover Publications, 1890, P.8)

Mechanical motions of course have no purpose in the sense of possessing the ability to choose between alternative ends or alternative means. A magnet cannot choose not to attract the iron filings. Whether this is due to the absence of agency or the absence of the right kind of principle or both is, of course a matter for conjecture. It is doubtful whether the magnet would ever feature in a Shakespeare tragedy as Romeo does. Romeo’s powers quite simply obey principles that we expect of an intelligent rational living being. His experiences are composed of doings and undergoings and they are organised in an architectonic of plot and character determined by Actions and their Reasons rather than substances(magnets and iron filings) and their transformations and changes.

James claims that Consciousness is necessary for the learning of intelligent performances which can then subsequently become pre-conscious and wait for activation by Conscious choice. He uses the example of an experiment on a hemisphere-less frog to illustrate the difference between spontaneous selection of ends and means and mechanical movement. He then links the hemispheres of the brain to the “representations of muscles at different levels in a hierarchically organised nervous system. In this system the spinal cord is involved in reflexive defensive activity and the hemispheres are the arena for bundles of sensory-motor representations. There is no direct reference to principles organising either the reflexive or the spontaneous activity but the description of the various functions of the nervous system certainly imply the operation of both constitutive and regulative principles.

Agency is not an idea or category that one can easily attribute to the brain, but it certainly is significant in the attribution of understanding, reasoning, and rationality to the doings and undergoings of a human being. Attempting to locate these “spontaneous” powers in a physical location such as a brain, risks committing to what P.M.S. Hacker called “the mereological fallacy”: claiming that what is true of the whole is also true of the part of the whole.

James does, however, specifically claim that the hemispheres of the brain are the physical location for consciousness–a different kind of claim that ought to be seriously considered. In his discussion of the issue “Does Consciousness exist?” (Essays in Radical Empiricism, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1966). James questions the wisdom of characterising consciousness as a substantial entity and recommends instead that we characterise it as a “function”. Instead, we should regard what he calls “pure experience” as the substance of knowing and thinking. This “substance” when taken in the context of one set of associates will provide us with the thing known, and when taken in another set of associates, provides us with the consciousness of the knower. To illustrate his thesis James uses the analogy of paint separated from a painting-lying ready for purchase in a paint shop. This paint when purchased and applied to the canvas in relation to other paint is used to represent objects two dimensionally: when thus used the spiritual function of the painting is created(P.9) This is reminiscent of hylomorphic accounts of art and whilst James continues to appeal to “pure experience” as the substance involved in this activity there is paradoxically no appeal to “Principles” in this account. A surprising omission given the fact that James was the author the of the work “Principles of Psychology”. An incipient dualism emerges, however, in the following:

“If the reader will take his own experiences he will see what I mean. Let him begin with perceptual experience, the “presentation” so called of a physical object, his actual field of vision, the room he sits in with the book he is reading as its centre: and let him for the present treat this complex object in the common sense way as being “really” what it sees to be, a collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual or potential relations.Now at the same time it is just these self same things which his mind, as we say, perceives: and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has just been one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a persons mind. The puzzle of how one identical room can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection.”(Essays P.11-12)

The two lines referred to above represent the personal biography of the reader of the book in the room and the physical history of the house of which the room is a part. James points out the obvious fact that the conscious experience of the book cannot, as such, catch fire but the actual book can, if the house catches fire and burns down. The personal biography of the reader will include memory of the meanings of the words once learned and other books that have been read. The house, the room and the physical book do not possess the power of memory, or the powers of understanding and reason and these physical objects are not conscious of anything. There certainly seems to be no reason to object to the “common sense” view of the physical world as composed of parts that can be divided up in various ways–ways which in turn do not deny the possibility of the conception of a universe as a continuum of mass and energy. All that is needed to sustain such a conception is the scientific assumption that the physical world is a spatio-temporal continuum. Such a conception allows us to characterise doings or actions arranged temporally into the unity of an action. This unity refers to principles behind the formulation of the maxims of such actions. In the above case the difference between reading the book in the present and the conceptualisation of an action stretching into the future of the temporal continuum, manifests the difference between the world “seen and felt”, and the world thought about in the absence of the thing being thought about. The “knowing” involved in these two alternative scenarios takes a different form. In the former case what we are dealing with is primarily a description of an event in terms of “is-concepts and judgements”, and in the latter case the maxims contain principles that are normative and belong in the “ought-system” of concepts. The world seen and felt and the world thought of both constitute, under different aspects, the spatio-temporal continuum of a world whose primary components are percepts, concepts and principles. Indeed James specifically claims in his essay “Does Consciousness exist?” that there is no difference in the degree of certainty involved in an object presently perceived, or an object conceived of in the remembered past or the anticipated future.There is, he mysteriously adds, no transformation of “an object known into a mental state.”(P.19)

James criticises the Kantian notion of an “I think” that accompanies all my representations on what appear to be Cartesian grounds, claiming that Kant is attempting to substantialise thought. He does not, however, discuss the role of the Categories or Principles of reason(noncontradiction, sufficient reason) in the organisation of acts of apperception. The Kantian architectonic regards thinking as an Act–something that is done–not an event occurring in the privacy of an individuals mind. Consciousness is involved in the act of apperception that takes the form of discriminating and selecting what should and what should not be subsumed under the concept being formed with the assistance of the Categories of the Understanding and the Principles of Reason. The Aristotelian perspective also disappears in James’ radical empiricist approach, especially when appeal is made to the structures and functions of the brain which he regards as the fundamental condition for the functions of life, consciousness, and mentality(the ontological levels proposed by O Shaughnessy).

Sensations, James maintains, are related to the functions of the lower centres of the brain whilst perception, memory, and thought appear to be connected to the higher centres and the hemispheres. The motor system located in the frontal lobe hemispheres is represented at all levels of the nervous system. Appetites, and the activity associated with them when connected with desires , memory and our belief system, are all situated in the higher centres of the nervous system. Abstract ends and complex means-end solutions are also situated in the memory-belief systems of rational animals capable of discourse. Even within the scope of this genus, James articulates a hierarchy of human life forms stretching from the tramp living from hour to hour, the bohemian living from day to day, the bachelor building his lonely individual life, the father building for the next generation , and the patriot who builds for whole communities and coming generations.(Principles, P.23). The role, however, of concepts, categories and principles in this hierarchy of forms is unclear. There is much talk of “currents”, “loop-lines”, “discharge”, “stimulus” and “response” , “groupings of sensory-motor elements” in relation to ideas, and memory, and belief systems. The proposed “model” for action initiated by the hemispheres is a reflex model illustrated by the example of a child whose fingers are burned by an attractive candle flame and who subsequently learns to retract his fingers the next time they reach for the flame. The grasping reflex is then inhibited by a sensory memory of the pain and a motor memory of retracting the fingers: both memories are located in the hemispheres.

James also provides us with an empirical account of language with Aristotelian elements:

“Take, for example, the “faculty” of language. It involves in reality a host of distinct powers. We must first have images of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualities and relations: we must first have the memory of words and then the capacity so to associate each idea or image with a particular word, that, when the word is heard, the idea shall henceforth enter our mind. We must conversely, as soon as the idea arises in the mind, associate it with a mental image of the word, and by means of this image we must innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to reproduce the word as physical sound. To read or write a language other elements still must be introduced. But it is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, association, judgement, and volition.”(P.28-9)

Many of these elements, e.g. association, memory, imagination are the typical array of powers promoted by empirical theorists, and the powers of understanding and reason are conspicuous by their absence from this account. The principles constituting and regulating this linguistic activity are also absent from the account. On this empirical view, ideas are copies of impressions related via the “mechanism” of association. The “Process” of discrimination so important for the act of conceptualisation is also not mentioned. The mimetic aspect of language is referred to, but not its expressive aspect as encountered in contexts of interrogation(“Lo!”) or prescription(“So act…!”). It is clear that the mechanism of association arises in connection with an obsession over the naming process and the possible “association” of the parts of brain involved in this process. The claim that a correlate of this process and mechanism both occur at the higher levels of consciousness and mentality is surely however a fallacy of some kind( the fallacy of projecting lower functions onto higher functions?)

Empiricism dogmatically views language in the light of the above obsession with the naming process: logical atomism then becomes the strategy for justifying the dogma. The Wittgensteinian “turn” from a logical approach to meaning to a more pragmatic approach in which the use of a word becomes crucial in determining its meaning, then becomes a crucial landmark in the history of modern Philosophy. Wittgenstein, we know read both Freud and William James with considerable interest. The use of a word is more easily connected to agency, action, and the good reasons given for activity in this domain. The reasons we give for holding a belief are more related to truth and knowledge. A rule in the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein can appear to be a regulative “mechanism” for discourse and can appear to be a mere “fact”, but the fact of the matter is that when we emphasise the normative aspect of rules we then see rules as signposts that we “ought” to follow. We then place rule following in the grammatical category of imperatives rather than descriptives. There is also a distinction between types of rule ranging from the “mere” mechanical level of exercising a simple skill (The King can only move one square at a time) to the more abstract and complex strategic level(do not leave your Queen exposed). James largely ignores the expressive function of language and its normative role in our communal language related activities.

In drawing the distinction between the higher and the lower centres James wonders whether the lower centres can possess a primitive form of consciousness. He discusses hypnosis and its implications:

“If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.”(Principles P.67)

This implies a higher thinking capacity located in the hemispheres: one in which knowing is occurring whether it be the knowing that the King can only move one square at a time or knowing that is it dangerous to allow ones Queen to become exposed to attack. Both of these knowledge items are learned in a state of consciousness that occurs at a higher level compared to the kind of learning that is occurring when the child learns to inhibit a grasping reflex. Yet we should, in this context, not forget that James’ criterion for mentality is pragmatic and related to the pursuance of ends and means and “intelligent action” (P.79).

Consciousness, for James, as it is for O Shaughnessy(OS), is a power intimately related to Attention, a power that is exercised in the act of apperception. Attention is a voluntary self-initiated activity and James outlines a scenario in which a sequence of acts or what he calls “nervous events”(P.114) are consciously chosen! What actually happens is a consciously chosen beginning of the sequence which then continues subconsciously until the end is reached and consciousness emerges again. The start and the end of the process are, according to James conducted at a high ideational level. Should anything go wrong in the subconscious section of the sequence, consciousness will emerge and the ideational level will once again regulate what is to be done next, either abandoning the project as a whole or making smaller regulatory adjustments. This suggests that habits(on Freudian theory) occur principally at the preconscious level and there is a transactional relation with the system of Consciousness(Cs).

In a section entitled “The ethical implications of the law of habit”, James points out that habit:

“dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or early choice.”(P.121)

A prophecy of doom if there ever was one, and a suitable fate for a creature that did not possess ideas of what he was doing and the will or freedom to choose to do something different. The message of the importance of rationally based Freedom was of course an Enlightenment message, but by the time we reach the 20th century this message has been submerged by the instrumentally and technologically minded “new men” for whom literally “everything was possible”. The categorical ethical end of the prescriptive normative idea of “The Good” had been all but lost, and pragmatism and utilitarianism were embraced by many scientists in the spirit of “modernism”. The Aristotelian rational end of virtue and the importance of character for the normative task of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) had also been marginalised by the time of the Enlightenment, and Kant’s attempt to restore categorical ethics in the arena of Philosophy only lasted up to time when Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy presented itself. Fortunately for us, the above Prophecy of doom is not a categorical prophecy but merely a hypothetical judgement which presupposes that we continually fail to exercise our powers of understanding and rationality. What is important to note here is that philosophical discussion since Aristotle’s hylomorphic shift from epistemological substance to metaphysical principle has preferred to focus on the former position which obscures the fact that ideas are not merely related to true beliefs but also to normatively structured good beliefs about good actions. Different principles regulate beliefs directed at the Truth and beliefs directed at The Good. Consciousness plays an equally important role in the learning process involved in the acquisition of concepts and truth-related beliefs, as it does in the learning process connected with actions. In the latter case we are not dealing with habits alone but also with a realm of explanations and justifications that are related to the imperative that has been handed down to us from the Greek oracles, namely “Know thyself!”. Both Aristotle and Kant believed that this form of knowledge transcended the scope of any one science and stretches over the domains of theoretical, practical and productive science. The task of Philosophy is then, to coordinate the judgements emanating from these different sciences and arrive at the essence of the self-principle.

James attempted to suggest that Habit plays the part of a principle in ethical life and the following maxim could well have been used as a formula for becoming one of the “new men” of the age, Arendt complained about:

“Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.”(P.124)

The evaluative, reflective and critical tribunal of areté has disappeared and the question as to whether the habits are good is not even raised. This question of course in turn requires an answer to the ethical question that can be raised in relation to the action concerned about the ethical value of the action: whether, that is, the action is Right. Keeping the flame of will and effort alive appeared to be more important to James than the Kantian absolute of the “good will” or the Aristotelian absolute of “the virtuous man”.

Consciousness is, at all levels, for James an agent of selection driven by its interests and instincts. Ends and means are selected. For James it appears that thinking about an end must always involve conscious ideation unless we are dealing with the subconscious thinking that occurs in a habit. The man who has formed the habit of punching people who disagree with him is of course consciously surprised when he is arrested and tried for his crime. Hopefully the tribunal will install an equivalent tribunal in the judgement system of the defendant: one which will question the wisdom of responding violently in contexts of disagreement. The defendant obviously has a long road to travel on the journey of knowing himself. What has to happen on this journey is that the responses initiated from the lower parts of the nervous system need to be regulated by the higher centres(the hemisphere, according to James). Ideational centres need to prevent impulses from colonising the motor system for violent purposes. The impulse needs to be inhibited and the question needs to be raised as to whether the violent response ought to occur. Here one imagines the language centres and the power of language needs to be engaged in this process. If, however, the impulsive response has become an ingrained habit, the question arises as to whether this impulsive complex has been split off from the self of the hemispheres. The will needs to be regulated by the belief/knowledge system and maxims need to be formulated that are rationally justified.

The brain is composed of lobes and the cortex of the occipital lobes is the site of things seen, whilst the temporal lobes is the site of things heard but Consciousness itself, James argues:

“is itself an integral thing not made of parts, “corresponds” to the entire activity of the brain, whatever that might be at the moment.”(P.177)

So, whilst the object thought of, e.g. the room in the house I am reading in, obviously is a complex made of parts and this is also the case for the brain related activity , it is not the case for the thought. The distinctions between consciousness and its objects and thought and its objects are both important for James, because he argues that “The Psychological Fallacy” is a form of reasoning that confuses what is true of the object with what us true of consciousness or thought. We should add that many Philosophers and Scientists are also guilty of this form of fallacious reasoning. James elaborates upon this point:

“If to have feelings and thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists and infallible ones. But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them, and write about them, name, them, classify and compare them and trace their relation to other things. Whilst alive they are their own property: it is only post mortem that they become his prey….No subjective state whilst present, is its own object: its object is always something else.”(P.189-90)

So the Psychologist must distinguish between the mental state and the act of talking about that state. This is obvious in our understanding the difference between an act of anger(punching someone) and the act of saying “I am angry with you”! In the process of naming the mental state, James reflects, a common mistake is to assume that the thought must have the same ontological and epistemological structure as the objects that are thought of. He admits that the relation of thought to its object is ultimately a mysterious matter and though we can know of the existence of this relation we can say very little about it. The only “universal conscious fact”(P.226) we can know about thoughts and feelings, argues James, is related to the necessary presence of a personal self, i.e. an “I”. It is the same I that thinks , feels, remembers, forgets, acts, judges understands, reasons etc. It is what endures in the change from feeling to thought. It is the stream of consciousness that carries all these activities to their telos or end, and although a stream theoretically could be measured in terms of a large number of coffee spoons of water, the stream re-composed in this form of measuring would have little to do with the entity of the stream flowing toward the river which in turn is flowing toward the sea. A more natural division of this stream would be in terms of its origin, extension and end.

According to James, Reasoning is also a selective agency and denotes the power of the mind to analyse and synthesise the totality of conditions of phenomena reasoned about and reason ones way to logical consequences.(P.287). Practical reasoning is a selection centre for whether one ought or ought not to perform a particular means-related action, whether or not one ought to pursue a particular end. James also refers to the way in which the human race as a whole selects means and ends and thereby regulates agreements and disagreements in relation to these. No specific mention is made of principles in this process but one presumes they will be playing an important role.

There is, however, no doubt about the fact that James does not embrace the Kantian Copernican Revolution insofar as knowledge and the synthesising activity of the “I” is concerned. James would claim that the reality of pure experience and the pragmatic method will suffice to ground our knowledge, and further that there is no need to refer to a Reality underlying appearance that no-one can know anything about. On Kantian assumptions we can think about the realm of the noumenal and to that extent we can have faith in its existence as the ground for the phenomena we experience. Kant however rejects any claim that reason can know anything about this underlying condition and he would reject any attempt to project what can be known about the objects of experience onto this noumenal realm. James and Kant would appear to be in agreement with this kind of attack on metaphysics. Otherwise James espouses an empirical approach to investigating the role of the self in our lives. Four forms of self are postulated: a material self, a social self, a spiritual self and what he calls a pure ego. This latter entity(the pure ego) resembles accounts of the transcendent self we find in Kant and others. It also resembles the metaphysical enduring self of Aristotle. If we ignore the radical empiricism and its methodology there is much in James that is suggestive of hylomorphic theory but the absence of a resting point or terminus of reasoning in “First Principles” is conspicuous by its absence.

The idea of “selection” James uses, might however be a psychological consequence of hylomorphic and critical thought. Selection is also operative at the level of the lower psychological processes:

“Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes experience”(P.402)

Interest and desire are present in the above in the form of choosing what I attend to. James does also agree with the Kantian distinction between objects of Sensibility and objects which are more abstract and intellectual. In the latter category of objects, interests and ends are more remote and distant, more abstract and ideal.

Attention, according to James has its effects in perception, conception, discrimination and memory. The act of conception for James has an ideal categorical character that tears us away from concrete reality. A white piece of paper burned black by a fire has changed but the concept of “white” and ” black” have not changed and remain the same(P.462). Indeed these concepts provide us with a kind of standard to be used to navigate through processes of change involving coloured phenomena: a standard that is not merely a matter of “convention” and cannot easily be abandoned. On this account we can extrapolate that the role of these concepts is to assist the voluntary operation of attention in the organising of the sensory manifold. James, however, also claims that concepts form an essentially discontinuous system that is “petrified” and “rigid”(P.468). Nevertheless it is clear on the Jamesian account that the purpose of the concept in this process of conceptualisation is to transform the perceived world into the world conceived. There are, however, on James’ account no categories or principles binding the elements of the conceptual world into a whole (cf Kant): a whole that normally manifest the ideals of “The Truth” and “The Good”.

The relation of James’ work to the work of O Shaughnessy is interesting in several respects. Firstly, both are in a certain sense physicalists although James is a radical empiricist and OS is clearly more inclined to embrace the ideal of the a priori that we find in many rationalist positions. Secondly, both thinkers wrote voluminously about The Will and Consciousness from their similar, though differing, perspectives. Thirdly, both thinkers agree that Consciousness is not to be analysed in terms of the category of “Substance”. Fourthly, both thinkers appear hesitant to adopt any position that resemble hylomorphic or critical metaphysical positions. OS appears to be more willing to speak of consciousness in relation to a priori concepts and he also is more willing to explore the truth orientation of this aspect of our psyche. OS also shares with James the belief that consciousness is intimately and necessarily connected to the having of experiences. Experience in the architectonic of OS’s ontological system is at the level of the psychological, above that of “life, and below that of the “mental”. OS also points out that beliefs, intentions and memories are not “experienced”. Experience for OS has objective reality and whilst we know that we are experiencing something, when we do so, it is unanalysable. It can however be situated in a classification matrix which defines it as belonging to the genus of what is necessary and psychological. James associated experience with the stream of consciousness which itself is in a constant state of change and flux. OS claims that experience is occurently, and continually, renewed.(Consciousness and the World,P.43)

OS also notes the important bond between experience and temporality. Experience picks out the present as a “now” and a passage of time as a continuity of nows(P51). This is in accordance with the Aristotelian definition of time which is “the measurement of motion in terms of before and after”. This definition refers to an activity, the doing of something, as distinct from the bare paying of attention to motion occurring, which of course is also a “possible experience”.

OS discusses animality in this context and a distinction is drawn between animal intention and action and its human form. The former is undoubtedly directed toward the future and suggests an animal can have expectations although perhaps not expectations it can think about. OS claims that the animal possesses no power or capacity to think about the future but it is capable of a mental posture or attitude toward an experienceable future. OS notes the important fact that in the context of explanation, human beings use future phenomena to explain present phenomena. For us, one phase of time logically relates to another. This fact is important for the account of intentional action which occurs, according to OS at the level of mentality where thinking connects a “now” to a matrix of past-present, and future: for this form of human mentality the past and the future meet in the present(P.55). Time is both psychologically and mentally structured in intentional action and this structure is manifested in the ethical schema of “Reason-Action-Consequence”: a schema that also stretches across the past-present-future continuum. This schema might be implied by the Heraclitean reference to a “Logos” of change.

The Kantian ship steaming downstream is Kant’s image of the relation of consciousness and Time and the seamless continuity of before, now, and after appears to be captured in this one image. This continuity, however is also manifested at a practical level by the above schema of Reason-Action-Consequence in which perhaps the presence of consciousness is more obvious than it is in the ship steaming downstream. In the case of the R-A-C schema it is obvious that agents engaged in action, experience the passage of time. In the act of speaking, for example, there is a consciousness of what has been said, what is being said now and what will be said. The agent involved in such action “inhabits” time. OS points out that time is not a principle or form of consciousness because two sensations of pain located in different bodies are, of course, psychological phenomena but they are not temporally related in one consciousness. Experience and Consciousness in the writings of Freud are regulated by the ERP(Energy regulation principle) which regulates life sustaining functions and the PPP(Pleasure-Pain Principle) which regulates what OS refers to as the psychological level of psuche. The higher the form of life, the more complex are the pleasures and pains experienced. The “man of experience” is of course acquainted with Ananke, and as a consequence approaches the world and his life with more than a hint of resignation as old-age approaches. This testifies to the important role of the Reality Principle(RP) in the organisation of his experience. It was in the spirit of the RP that Socrates defined his own death as a necessary good, whether it would take the form of a dreamless sleep or an after-life form of existence. Socrates was the rational man of experience par excellence–a fact well illustrated by his philosophical activities in the agora.

OS claims that in terms of experience Time is a more important dimension of existence than lived-in space:

“time is closer to our essential nature than is space.”(P.66)

The life of an organism obviously proceeds essentially in time, and the notion of process assumes an importance at the same level as state. Processes are the very stuff of experience and consciousness, but states of consciousness are also important milestones. There does not, however, appear to be any important use for the term “states of experience”. An animal that is asleep is obviously not conscious but if it is capable of dreaming it is surely experiencing its dreaming.

In his analysis of whether the term “state of consciousness” possesses a real or an a priori determinable essence OS claims that Consciousness is a basic fundamental state and all other states are privative or derivative(P.73) The arguments for this position are four-fold:

1. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for states of consciousness.
2. States explain the properties of these states.
3. There are techniques for causing a loss of consciousness and to assist someone in an unconscious state to regain consciousness.
4. Properties form syndromes or constellation.

OS also maintains that sleep and comatose state-conditions are states of consciousness and the question then arises as to whether these too can be classified as “psychological” states. Sleep appears to meet the conditions necessary but a question mark hangs over the latter condition. Beings in a comatose state are certainly alive and if they are human they still possess potentialities that can be actualised in a waking state. The term “state of consciousness” helps us to remember that though Consciousness may perform the important function of opening a window onto the world it is not as such directed at objects in the way perception is. This fact may force us to look for its origins not in any psychological state but rather in the brain(P.80). This is a non-psychological cause and the principle involved in the regulation of cerebral states can only be the ERP. We also need to rely on explanation of mechanical kinds to describe such activity. This may help us to distinguish consciousness from experience, although it will still remain true to say that the stream of consciousness is something experienced. Consciousness, regarded from a hylomorphic perspective, is constituted both by its material substrate operating in accordance with material/mechanical principles and by a set of psychological powers that also have their origin in a body composed of a constellation of organs and limbs that in turn form the physical substrate of the human form of life. There is also the Critical view of Consciousness which consists in assembling the necessary and sufficient conditions of its phenomena in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. It does appear as if OS is using some form of the critical approach in his attempts to sketch the outlines of Consciousness. Kant, however, also emphasises the use of practical reason and its contexts of justification. The Kantian architectonic would, of course, require charting the role of consciousness in relation to both types of reasoning.

The Consciousness we have of the fact that the lightning has struck the tree is a more complex matter than the bare intuition of the phenomenon of the lightning striking the tree, but the former could not occur without the latter, thus affirming the Kantian axiom that concepts without intuitions are empty. Conceptualisation in both Kantian and Aristotelian theory is an important element of all higher forms of consciousness in which Sensibility and Understanding are preparing true beliefs of the kind “The lightning struck the tree”. True beliefs also are integrated into a larger scale thinking process that possess the aims of explanation and justification. With this larger scale venture we are definitively placed in the ontological realm of the mental.

Practical reason orbits around the actions of man rather than his beliefs, and in this respect is closer to the reality it is constituting and regulating. Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics argued that every activity aims at the good and this ought to suffice to place all discourse and all forms of reasoning about action high on the list of the defining features of human life. Willing, as OS points out, can be both bodily(intimately related to the body-image) and mental. The goods of animal strivings involve only the bodily will and their body-image and consequently a psychological lower form of consciousness. Animal consciousness is not self-determined in the way human consciousness is and the mere fact that we have consciousness in common as life forms does not in any way guarantee that the forms of consciousness are the same. The behaviourists have perhaps discovered this fact but continue to either claim that consciousness does not exist, or alternatively, that it has no role in the explanation of the highest life forms.

OS claims that there is a mutually supporting circle of powers helping to constitute consciousness and actualise it in accordance with the life-form that has generated it. These powers are situated in an architectonic ontological matrix of life-consciousness–mentality. Perception and Action lie at the input- output thresholds of this matrix, at the thresholds leading in from, and out to, Reality. On Freud’s hylomorphic/critical account of Consciousness there is an important link to external reality but there are also links to the Preconscious and Unconscious systems that form the context of id, ego, and superego activity. These systems and agencies have a developmental history and telos best described in hylomorphic terms. The Reality Principle largely determines the actualisation of the powers of understanding and rationality and also crucially determines a state of self-consciousness that is based on the knowledge of the activity and the power of ones mind.

Aristotle widens the scope of concern we moderns have in relation to reality by relating knowledge to desire and making the universal claim that we all necessarily desire to know. He embedded this desire in an attitude of awe and wonder in the face of the world: an attitude that can only be dispelled by asking and attempting seriously to answer questions posed in contexts of explanation/justification(Why-questions). Accompanying this awe and wonder at the external world is an awareness of a power of self consciousness.

OS paradoxically approves of both the Freudian and Cartesian accounts of self consciousness. He wishes to combine knowing the nature of my existence through “thinking”, and an understanding of the self , that ranges from an understanding of the body regulated by the ERP and the PPP, to an understanding of the human psuche via the activities of the agencies of the Ego and Superego. For Freud we know these things because we are aware of truths about our selves under various aspects. OS shares the Freudian conviction that the mental health of the subject is crucial for actualising the potentiality for the above kind of self awareness. The Reality Principle plays an important role in the constitution and regulation of the kind of self understanding required for “knowing oneself”.

OS illustrates the truths that an animal knows ,e.g. a dog knows it is about to be fed, but the dog is not aware of the higher order fact that it is True that it is about to be fed. The reason for this state of affairs, OS argues, is that the animal is unable to compare the “thought” “I am about to be fed” with the reality that makes it true. It is a familiar psychological observation that animals are tied to their environment in a way that we humans are not. Our thought is capable of psychically distancing itself from reality and this is evident in its activity of linking concepts in veritative(truth-making) syntheses e.g. Categorical judgements distinguishing what is possible from what us actual. The psychical space created by categorical judgements is formed in a voluntary self-constituted logically structured(with principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason) space. From this perspective knowing hypotheticals such as not-P might be false but is in fact true is a part of our belief systems. OS in fact appeals in the context of this discussion to Kantian Categories of Judgement. Self-consciousness or self awareness is conditional(i.e. related to necessary and sufficient conditions). They are therefore potentialities that can fail to be actualised. The predominance of this kind of awareness, OS argues, reveals a Cartesian bias in the account of the so-called “state of consciousness”– a bias that claims we need to be conscious of the present specific contents of inner consciousness but no such condition applies to the contents of outer reality.

OS does in fact specifically discuss psychotic states of mind and points to the way in which the products of the imagination tend to invade the experience of reality, creating a dream-like state in which, according to Freud, the ERP and the PPP distort both the spatial and temporal aspects of Consciousness. The problem with states of mind in which this invasion occurs is that the psychotic does not know that his experience is being partly determined by his imagination. This condition is similar to that of the dreamer who believes he is perceiving something rather than knowing that he is imagining what he is experiencing. The psychotic giving a speech to cows in a field does not, OS claims, “know what he is doing”. He elaborates upon this by claiming that of course the psychotic knows that he is speaking but what he does not know is that he is addressing imaginary beings(the seraphim). It is this kind of “occurrent delusion” that if presented as a defence in a court of law can excuse the man prosecuted for a crime. Insanity alone is not a sufficient defence. What the schizophrenic experiencing an occurrent delusion lacks, which other insane people do not, is the possibility of distancing themselves in thought from their actions and reasoning about whether they are right or wrong. There is, in such cases, a significant failure of insight or self-knowledge linked to a failure to choose freely for oneself what ought to be done. Even if there do exist veridical beliefs in the belief system of the psychotic suffering from an occurrent delusion, e.g. “I am speaking here and now”, these are tied to fantastically delusional beliefs of being divine(“I am the alpha and omega”). The total experiential product suffices to destroy the texture of reality otherwise sustained by belief systems whose task it is to cognitively represent the world as it is and as it can be. The belief system of the normal person evolves and transforms itself in accordance with the powers of perception and reasoning but this natural evolution and transformation is not available to the psychotic partly because his anxiety saturated memory system is compelled to repeat the same trauma over and over again without significant variation. Even experiencing himself speaking is so structured that it does not form a normal memory in the psychotics memory system. A normal memory over the course of time can dissipate large amounts of anxiety and allow the traumatic core of the memory to embed itself in contexts of many different kinds of associates. It is learning that is largely responsible for the transformation of the normal persons belief system and pleasure supervenes as a consequence: in sharp contrast to the painful state of mind of the psychotic. It is the former state of consciousness that is best equipped to produce knowledge. In such states the concern is not merely for the truth(what is happening, has happened) but also with explanation/justification(why it happened or ought not to have happened). It is this structure that enables actions and beliefs to be justified/explained in terms of their reasons.

OS appeals to Cartesianism in this work but he might equally have appealed to the role of thought in Kantian Critical Philosophy and its architectonic of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Needless to say the Kantian account of thought is far more complex than that which we encounter in Cartesian accounts. The scope of the Kantian architectonic certainly can sustain a discussion of dreams without an appeal to God and it can also provide many of the concepts required to correctly characterise a difference between normal and psychotic states of consciousness. It can also provide us with a justification of scientific explanation across the domain of the three kinds of science Freud refers to in his account of mental health. Cartesianism contributed to the epistemologisation of Philosophical thinking in a way that Kantian Critical Philosophy did not. Descartes’ obsession with mathematical forms of reasoning also contributed toward the acceptance of mechanical forms of explanation for the phenomena of life-forms, preferring to dismiss important categorical distinctions that we inherited from the more biologically oriented Aristotelian accounts of psuche. For Descartes, as we have indicated before, the cries of unaesthetised animals were merely sounds or vibrations of the air(manifestations of energy). For OS on the other hand, the consciousness of these suffering animals and the suffering of human beings were indistinguishable and any attempt to harm animals would certainly have met with a Pythagorean response by OS(the yelp of a dog kicked was the cry of a kindred spirit). For Descartes it was clearly the case that the exactitude of the measurements of physics and the axiomatic certainty of physical laws made more of an impression on Descartes’ thinking than did Aristotle’s De Anima.

Experience, for OS, is inextricably linked to the concepts of “process” and “event” and this once again raises our earlier question as to whether the concept of “event”(that which happens) suffices to characterise agency and action in a context of explanation/justification. This in turn raises the further question as to whether the concept of “event” could contribute anything positive to ethical discourse in the wider sense envisaged by Aristotle who rested his system on areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Surely, many would argue an event just happens and is what it is: it cannot make sense to claim that it ought not to have occurred. An event just does not seem to possess the right form of universality(of the ought) to be of any use in ethical or religious discussions or indeed any form of discourse involving values. House-building is one activity but does it make sense to say that it is one event? Housebuilding causes the existence of its product: the house, but if we introduce the concept of event it seems that the category of cause and effect is implied, especially if we are called upon to describe or explain the phenomenon as it appears to us. What was clearly one logical activity suddenly becomes two, namely the process of the building and the finished product.

John Dewey in his work “Art as Experience” characterised experience in terms of undergoing and doing, without addressing the essential ontological distinction between the two as noticed by Kant: the distinction between what happens to one and what one does. It certainly, at the very least, appears to strain the requirements of grammar to claim that events are something that is done. The safer option here would appear to be to align experience with doing and situate it in a matrix of power, agency, possibility, potentiality and purpose. It is, of course undeniable that physical processes/events underlie experience and this materialist connection might account for the appearance of compatibility between the normal language of experience and the language of events. The language of processes/events serve thus to focus on the material and efficient explanations of the phenomena concerned rather than on the more relevant final and formal explanations that are of central importance in hylomorphic theory. It is these latter forms of “cause” that are more relevant to determine the essence of the actions we engage in.

OS partly rests his argument in favour of the reduction of experience to events upon the position which claims that mental processes must transform themselves into mental states–the processes of forgetting, for example, result in a state of forgetfulness. OS admits that this transformation takes place “out of sight”(P.178) but he also adds that he agrees that forgetfulness cannot be an experience because experience as per his definition cannot be a state composed of states. Similarly the states of belief and intention are non experiential. His argument for this is the following: I can go to sleep with the intention of buying a house and wake up believing that it is not a good idea to buy a house(P.178). A non-experiential process has occurred in the interim he claims–a process outside of the realm of consciousness. The question to raise here is whether the description “I have changed my mind” is a relevant thing to say about this phenomenon. If the answer is that it is, then a further question arises as to whether, in changing my mind, this is something that has happened to me or something that I have done. If experience is best defined as Dewey claimed, a matter of both undergoing and doing, then perhaps we can say of the case under discussion that we are dealing with an activity that was outside the scope of consciousness. This approach, however raises other problems which may require an architectonic as complex as that of Freud’s theories to resolve. The agency of the Ego, we know has conscious, preconscious and unconscious dimensions. The conscious ego is, for Freud the primary vehicle of our contact with reality but the preconscious system uses our knowledge and the meaning of words as part of its contribution to our transactions with reality. This account does not sit comfortably with the Cartesian account of experience as something that is somehow “infallibly known”(P.181). For both Descartes and OS there can be no category of phenomena that can be termed “unconscious experiences” because by stipulation all experience occurs within the confines of the “stream of consciousness”. OS notes in passing that Freud never postulated the existence of unconscious emotions, but what are we to say about those learning processes that occur in the run-up to the formation of a belief, e.g. after the learning process involved in building house– I now believe that I can build a house? On one account all that is required is the conscious idea of the house and the will to engage in the building process. This in its turn requires that I have insight into my own intentions. Is this insight a more stable phenomenon than my belief that it is raining? This latter may in the end require meteorological knowledge if I am called upon to justify the truth of my belief– I felt a drop but did it fall or was it hanging in the air? Might it be the case that once self actualisation processes have mobilised the necessary and sufficient conditions for insight, that this inner self-knowledge is more stable? Knowing that it is raining does not make me a meteorologist but knowing how to build a house does make me a builder, knowing how to do mathematics does make me a mathematician and knowing oneself might similarly make one a wise person or a philosopher. Is the difference then between a builder and a wise man a matter of the difference between inner(insight) and outer knowledge? Are these different aspects of experience or does insight transcend experience?

In a section entitled “Principles of Insight”(P.189) OS launches an investigation into Insight in terms of aims and principles. What emerges from this discussion is the importance of self knowledge for the form of consciousness we encounter in the human life form(the rational animal capable of discourse).OS also highlights the importance of thinking for the constitution of the condition of consciousness(P.200). The quote that follows touches upon our earlier discussion of the logical difficulties involved in identifying active experience with the analytically motivated reductionist concept of “event”:

“One interesting fact about the conscious is that their experiential life is active in character. I do not just mean that it is eventful, I mean that it is actively or intentionally or willingfully eventful”.(P.200)

In the context of this discussion OS claims that the stream of consciousness contains essentially active phenomena. The focus upon a substance like phenomenon such as a stream and focusing upon its contents, however, does make it easier to look at the contents of the stream as something that happens to it. Kant in his First Critique did speak of the possibility of characterising human activity in terms of cause-effect and events, as well as in terms of self-initiated activity : different forms of reasoning, e.g. theoretical and practical are however involved and the question then is raised as to whether theoretical reasoning necessarily falls upon the ontological psychological category of “that which happens to man” rather than “what man makes of himself”.

Desire of course, becomes more complex as the experience of the animal form of life concerned becomes more complex. Powers build upon powers and the integrated result forms a self-conscious form of consciousness that is capable of even accepting the extinction of its own life. Complex attitudes such as this emerge from an actualisation process in which the first actuality of the human form of psuche is the actualisation of the power of discourse in terms of its systematic exercise. The next level of the actualisation process results in the systematic exercise of the power of reason in both its theoretical and practical forms. OS points to the importance of the ontological condition of being active in the achievement of the condition of Consciousness and he argues insightfully that there is an interdependence between the executive and cognitive functions of life forms. He further maintains that the linguistic power of the self conscious form of consciousness is dependent upon this interdependence rather than vice versa.

OS emphasises that activity per se is not sufficient to generate what he calls the “charmed circle” of mutually supporting powers that actualise in a human form of psuche. Activity can take two forms it is argued, firstly the explorative activity of attention and perception in the construction of objects in relation to a spatio-temporal continuum. Secondly, the internal activity of synthesising past-present and future in the context of action. These different forms of activity have different aims, namely The Truth and The Good and different metaphysical conditions underlie these different forms. Different kinds of knowledge are involved in the performance of what can be regarded as a determinate theoretical task as compared with the practical tasks that manifest choice and freedom. Observation is obviously involved in theoretical explorative, object-constructing activity and non-observational forms of awareness are involved in idea-guided bodily movement: the body-image will also be involved in this latter kind of activity aiming teleologically at its purpose with the assistance of both maxims and principles.

OS refers to the mental will and its connection with the power of reasoning activated by an agent. The action produced as a consequence originates internally but is consummated externally when a desired/intended state of affairs is brought about. Wittgenstein in his later thought claimed that an inner process always stands in need of outer criteria and the bond between these is obviously in one sense causal and in another primarily logical and conceptual. On both the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts less emphasis is placed on the exchange between inner and outer events/processes and more attention is paid to principles capable of operating as major premises in practical argumentation: principles which form a foundation for the reasoning which concludes that a particular action ought to be done. As far as OS is concerned the bond between the will and reason is mysterious and this is perhaps tied to an assumption that inner mental events need to be related to outer behavioural events. There is, however, we are suggesting, an alternative interpretation of Wittgensteins thought and that involves seeing the behaviour as manifesting or revealing something logically connected with it. There is, in such circumstances no call for invoking a possible material/efficient causal explanation. The roll of thought events in this context are called into question. Thought in the form of a principle that is self constituted may be a more reasonable characterisation of such a state of affairs. If Kant was correct in his claim that “every event must have a cause” is an a priori truth, then applying this in practical contexts where action is involved appears to be a dubious invitation to divide a logical whole into material entities and relations. Accepting such an invitation then neutralises the operation of the principle of sufficient reason.

Refusing to accept such an invitation, however, allows us to regard thought as agent constituted entities that aim at the True: these entities can then be seen as parts of a belief system that as a whole aims at “The Truth”. Obviously false beliefs can be a part of this system but there is a question as to whether deluded beliefs such as

“I am Napoleon”

can be a part of the system. Such a belief ruptures our ideas about life, death, History and individuality and also seriously threatens our relation to Reality.

OS in a section entitled “Perception and Truth” discusses the role of Perception in Consciousness from what is clearly an analytical point of view. He discusses the distinction between the waking state and the state of being asleep and the role of consciousness in both . He admits that there is a persistence of the stream of consciousness in sleep that manifests itself in dreaming activity. This latter state however has a questionable relation to reality in that the dreamer believes falsely that he is engaging in actions. This is a misapprehension, what is “experienced” is a product of the imagination(e.g. wishes engaging with the memory system). In the waking state the stream of consciousness assists in generating our waking experiences via the use of the will and the “mechanism” of attention.

OS raises the classical analytical question of whether we are aware of facts or of things. He claims that noticing that the tree was struck by lightning does not only engage the attention but is a more complex cognitive “event” that has the “aim” of forming a belief. The attention appears to be operating at the psychological level of the human psuche but beliefs that aim at truth appear definitely to be operating at the higher level of “the mental”. The true belief that the lightning struck the tree is, of course, logically related to the psychological activity of noticing. The memory in its cognitive mode also needs to be engaged for the activity to become a “mental” activity. The pure noticing of the lightning strike is of course also a possible “experience” but engaging with the conceptual system certainly appears to take the activity out of the realm of Sensibility and move it into the realm of the Understanding. Claiming that in the simpler case of noticing, that we “notice” facts is confusing one kind of apprehension with another. In the course of this discussion OS once again claims that perception is an “event”. Whether this way of describing the matter is compatible with the involvement of the will is a question we raised earlier. Critical Philosophy refers to the role of the transcendental imagination operating intermediately between intuition and understanding to form what Kant calls schema-images of concepts as part of the preparation for thinking conceptually about a phenomenon. The imagination uses non conceptual rules for the formation of these schema-images.

OS deals with the imagination in a section entitled “The Imagination” and he invokes a diverse number of contexts in order to illustrate the wide scope of the exercise and products of imaginative activity. There are three different modes of exercising the imagination:

1. Imagination that as is engaged in by the construction of a fictional narrative by an author
2. Imaginative perception employed when we engage with representations such as photographs or film
3. Perceptual imaginings, e.g. hallucinations or mental imagery.

OS is conducting an analytical investigation, an analytical exploration into the activities of the imagination in an attempt to see what they may or may not have in common. The goal is a definition that does not have to meet the requirements of providing the necessary and sufficient conditions of what is being investigated. The “defining marks” of the phenomena being investigated appears to be satisfactory outcome although OS does acknowledge the difference between relational(causal) and constitutive(essence specifying) properties.

Propositional imagining is probably the most interesting sub-species of the genus being investigated, containing as it does the widest literary and philosophical implications for our cultural lives. Imagining is also a sub species of thinking, OS maintains (p.344). There is, in OS’s account, however, no opposition of the kind we encounter in the writings of the positivists and atomists, namely, that between objective thinking and subjective imagining. Indeed, OS even allows for the possibility that dream beliefs can be accidentally true and claims further that dreams have a “robust relation to reality”(P.345) given the fact that the memory system assists in providing the content. If, for example, I dream that I am in Paris the dream scene is provided by the memory system and knowledge that it is I and not someone else that believes they are in Paris. Of course one can have this dream and wake up in Bogna Regis and it then becomes clear that I was not in Paris but merely imagined that I was, but it is still however true that it was I and not someone else that dreamed I was in Paris : and I know this in some sense.

Fiction has a structure that is partly constituted by the imagination and the product we are confronted with may be a product of both our knowledge about the world and our knowledge about ourselves(about the self and its transcendental features). The “experiences reported in fictional narrative are of course in some sense “unreal” and “imagined” but they are tied together by an aesthetic idea that unifies and guides the content in a way analogous to the way in which principles and laws govern content in the Theoretical and Practical Sciences. The Productive Sciences in general communicate ideas that relate conceptually and logically to their products, but poetry and theatre aim not at knowledge about external reality or action but at the worthiness of the Agent behind the actions via a plot construction that meets the criteria of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Productive science is thereby more intimately linked to ethics and Practical science than it is to the Theoretical sciences. The plot of tragedy clearly has ethical intentions via the medium of aesthetic ideas. Imagining someone murdering his King and then as a consequence losing his mind by degrees over a period of time may well be an aesthetic way of thinking about Justice(diké) and Ananke. It is a way of consciously imagining that justice is an end in itself both good in itself and good in its consequences.

Imaginative seeing for OS is imagining a landscape via the photograph of it. Here the imagining is occurring without the use of concepts. It is to be distinguished from visual imaging which manifests itself in the form of hallucinations, dream perception and mental imagery. After conducting his survey of the forms of imagination and their products OS arrives at the insight that the best that can be achieved is not a constitutive essence specifying definition of the phenomenon but rather only its defining marks which indicate that imagining of all forms are “imitations” of reality that can have different causes and different purposes. The “normal” relation to reality in this mode of “thinking” is short circuited and a form of thinking that is only analogous to The True emerges, constituted by practical and productive ideas of the Good. If, as in the case of dreams, the mental powers required for narration are inoperative, we then find ourselves confronting a phenomenon where even space and time can be ruptured in dream scenes that appear to defy logic. Any plot requires at least an intact time structure of a beginning a middle and an end and is thereby a more complex imaginative creation than the dream.

Perception is on some theories regarded under the ontological aspect of “What happens to us rather than under the aspect of “What we do”. If, as Kant claims, the ontological distinction between what happens to us and what we do is an absolute distinction then it becomes problematic to claim that we can will our perceptions and perceive our willings. But surely we must be aware of our willings. Even in the extreme case of having lost a limb and trying to move that limb, I must be aware of having tried to move that limb. But could it not also be the case that in looking at a landscape I am non observationally aware of moving my eyes(as part of the awareness of my body-image). Is this what we mean by self-knowledge at the level of perception? According to OS self knowledge is part of our rational condition(P.409). This a condition in which the relationship between the potentiality for rationality and its actuality is a complex matter. The degree of self consciousness associated with the actualisation of the rational powers will probably correspond to the extent to which the rational condition has been actualised in the individual concerned, which in turn is conditional upon the extent to which powers have been integrated with other powers in the developmental process, e.g. the power of perception and the power of action. Attempting to characterise the relation of experience to both of these powers without recognising the ontological divide within the stream of consciousness merely seems to confuse matters. John Dewey in his work “Art as Experience is aware that the ontological divide can only be unified against the biological background of the interaction of a living creature with its environing conditions. Dewey chooses to use the term “Art” solely in relation to the doing of something or making of an art object. He uses the term “aesthetic” to describe the experience of appreciation. Art, for Dewey is emotional, to do with a self:

“concerned in the movement of events toward an issue that is desired or disliked.”(P.42)

(Art as Experience, New York, Capricorn Books, 1958)

Dewey refuses to connect experience with object-events and instead insists that we are dealing with a more complex phenomenon of “events with meaning”, For Dewey it is the power of the imagination in an emotive mode that creates “meaning”. Part of this meaning is related to the way in which knowledge is both used and transformed in the work of art. For Dewey, a bare awareness of events, would be an insufficient characterisation of the kind of knowledge that is meaningfully employed. Emotion, for Dewey, in a work of art, functions in very much the same way as the aesthetic idea does in Kant’s aesthetic theory. In Kant we are not dealing with nature divided into events and causes but rather with a nature that in contrast to its causal relations has its finalities(nature as a final end). For both Kant and Dewey, the aesthetic idea of feeling is not an empirical sensation-like entity but more like a complex feeling of life. The perception of the landscape for Dewey might, that is, be construed as an event with meaning generated by a similar event with meaning, namely the willed movement of the eyes. In modern Psychology the role of the eyes is a life function that is even involved in the generation of dream images(REM). Both the landscape and the dream become then, events with meaning in the “feeling of life”. Both events, however, are different because they incorporate forms of awareness that are different–in the case of the landscape we are dealing with an observational form of awareness but in the case of the dream the awareness obviously has to be of a different kind. Dewey claimed that the Kantian “feeling of life” involved in aesthetic situations ought to be characterised as the “sense of moving tendencies” that is generated by the imagination operating in an emotional context–a sense rooted in the biological relation one has to ones environment, culminating in an object that is constituted not causally but in terms of being a final end of nature in itself created not by another separably identifiable event but created by an agent with an intention to create a sense of contentment. This is the structure, then, that gives rise to the aesthetic judgement made in the spirit of universality and necessity.

OS in his discussion of visual perception notes the importance of the fact of depth perception. In perception of a landscape the eyes can focus on an object lying further away and the landscape can form around this new figure. Depth perception is a universal characteristic of perception and is partly responsible for the objectivity of perception. If we were to attempt to translate this transformation of the first perception of the landscape into the second perception of a landscape further away, into the language of event or object, it is not certain that the above mentioned objectivity and universality can be maintained. In the end even Dewey’s concept of an object as an event with meaning fails to provide us with the means to correctly characterise visual experience and the peculiar kinds of knowledge involved(e.g. spatial intuition).

The Being of seeing, according to OS, cannot be related to causal conditions but must rather be related to constitutive non causal conditions. Seeing is, as Kant envisaged, not full blown knowledge in itself because in its raw form it is a mere power with a particular essence. In its raw form it is exercised in acts of attention, e.g. in focussing upon parts of a landscape. What happens after this initial moment in time is dependent upon whether other powers, e.g. the understanding or language become involved or not. Causal conditions such as the invisible light beams which play a crucial role in making the visibility of objects possible, obviously belong to the material and efficient conditions for the formation of visual phenomena. Were the sun to explode and light eventually to disappear from our solar system this might well as a matter of fact cause the extinction of many life forms. Those life forms that survive(not perhaps for very long) would possess sensory motor fields in which sound waves would replace light beams. Memories of light would persist and be an important part of the cultural heritage and perhaps if we were ingenious enough to replace the biological life enhancing effects of light, life would persist under the conditions of artificial light. OS points out that we do not need to engage in explorations to find the source of light as we do with sounds that present themselves more ambiguously. OS argues in his analysis of sound that there can be no “sound representative” account of the perception of sound(P.447). Sound obviously travels more slowly and may in special cases have ceased at its origin when it reaches its destination but this does not hinder us from perceiving the direction the sound emanated from. This is also true of light over great distances(e.g. light years): the arrival of light from a star that has gone out of existence is intelligible on a Kantian account and on the accounts given by science. Light is obviously a more complex medium than sound bringing with it the shape of the object and immediately causing colour under the right conditions. Sound may also, in particular circumstances bring with it some indication of the texture of the surface it emanated from to the discriminating listener. The fact that the appearance in my telescope of the orange light originating in a position in space many light years away is exactly the same whether the source of the light exists or not indicates that our contact with objects is primarily epistemological. This fact also testifies to the importance of sense perception in the generation of knowledge about what really exists. The articulation of the phenomenon of light would also suggest that we can objectify the light beam into an orange cylindrical form, into an object whose meaning is of course partially dependent upon the nature of light but also dependent upon the form of its source. If all of this is true, Moore’s proof of the existence of the external world: “Here is one hand”, “Here is another hand” does not fully meet the requirements of an unambiguous proof: is Moore referring to the hand that is part of the body-image and whose movement has its source in the motor system of the brain, or its sense-data or both?

There is no doubting the importance of the scientific investigation of phenomena under the condition that it refrains from reductionism, respects more modest metaphysical presuppositions, and understands the categorical framework and the operation of principles involved in the investigation of all forms of phenomena: i.e. physical phenomena and organic phenomena such as the movement of a hand might well require different methods of investigation, different categorical assumptions and determination by different laws even if the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason apply across the whole range of phenomena. The differences between the material and efficient conditions of auditory and visual phenomena for example ought to be left to the scientist to investigate. There is of course an obvious phenomenological difference between seeing and hearing that ought also to be investigated. Sounds, phenomenologically, are more diffuse than sights and do not press on the attention in the same way: they do not spontaneously build “fields” in the form of landscapes although a concert may be an artificially constructed exception to this rule.

What the above scientific excursion into the sensory world may reveal is that there is in fact a case for sense-data in the analysis of sensory phenomena. This claim cannot obviously rest on a commitment to atomistic theories of the so-called psychological primitive of sensation that we have argued against throughout these volumes. Attention, for example, is as vital to the psychological equation constituting sensory-motor forms of life, as is voluntary movement. Sense -data obviously fall on the retina and the orange form I saw through the telescope after having been processed by the rods and cones of the eye generate an image on the retina. OS provides us with the following account:

“..assume that the retinal area under consideration is sufficiently central to permit full perceptual colour differentiation. Then given these background considerations,(a quotum) light of colour C1 at point P1 on the retina is in such a conscious being a causally sufficient condition of colour C1 being present at a corresponding point P1′ in the visual field. Now let us make one more innocuous assumption. Let us assume that the C1 light at point P1, effects the appearance of C1 in the visual field through locally generating some chemical (x). Why not? It must do it in some way. Accordingly (x) at P1 must in the assumed standing conditions be a causally sufficient condition of colour C1 at point P1′ in the visual field…It is in my view already weighty argument in favour of the view that when in normal vision C1 light impinges at P1 on the retina, it causes a visual sensation of colour C1 at P1′ in the visual field.”(P 467-8)

It is important to note that in the above account of what occurs prior to the visual sensation, reference is made to physical conditions(light, chemical(x)) and this reference is on OS’s account non-psychological. The visual sensation of orange, on the other hand ,is psychological in accordance with OS’s ontological architectonic. This separation of ontological domains correlates very well with the Aristotelian separation between material/efficient conditions and formal/final conditions. The consciousness of orange that ensues after the physical chemical transaction is of course available as an individual phenomenon to no one else but the possessor of the body that is affected and generates the chemical but the sensation as such only becomes conscious under psychological conditions. With this kind of reflection we leave the realm of physical events and causation behind and enter into the domain of the psychological. The sensation, OS argues is the only psychological item that can become the material object of attention(P.534).

The role of language as a mediator in the production of knowledge is also dealt with in OS’s account. He proposes an evolutionary account of knowledge in which there is an initial stage where language( in a hypothetical mood) singles out for linguistic attention items in the physical world without necessarily knowing very much about their essences. He cites as evidence the first namings of metals and diseases. This, it could be argued, given the above abstruse account of visual perception, might be true of the phenomenon of perception, although if one for example examines the ancient greek words for auditory phenomena much of the essence of the phenomena appears to be captured by Greek vocabulary. The scientific account however is even more complex and provides us with the following chain of phenomena: the transitivity of attention travels down a chain extending form the psychological(non-mental) part of the mind to the lighting of the landscape to the snow on the surface of the mountainside situated in space. This analysis also suggests a characterisation of the phenomenon of perception into the perceptual “given”( a visual field composed of two dimensional points) ordered in accordance with colour values. Such a visual field (under a certain description) will contain no shapes or structures of any kind(P.546). So, it is not sensations but these two dimensional colour points that are the atoms of the system OS describes. Analysis as a philosophical method is required because, contrary to the claims of some realists we never perceive material object particulars directly but only via mediator items, i.e. we only perceive some particular X in virtue of seeing something else, a Y, which is not identical with the X. For example:

“I see Mt Blanc through seeing its south side, its south side through seeing its south surface, its south surface through seeing a patch of snow thereon.”(P.549)

Yet the seeing of X and the seeing of Y is in some sense conceptually related . There are multiple descriptions of the particular of Mt Blanc and each description will relate to a different Y mediator. The two dimensional colour valued point system never as such becomes a phenomenon of experience that can be singled out by the attention. It is in fact the mediators that live epistemologically closer to the perceiver. The first item in the chain of mediators will provide a description that is not a matter of interpretation, e.g. the two dimensional pointillist visual field.

But what then is a material object, e.g. a mountain? Is it the matter of the mountain that is its essence? We know that the matter must be formed(organised) before any essence can be attributed to it. Matter in itself and without form is mysterious and its inner constitution is not given to us in any way. For OS the material object necessarily has an inside, sides, surfaces, a shape, and parts. We may not be able to perceive the inside of an object depending upon the disposition of the surfaces. The inner density of an object is such that it can have many aspects and perception alone cannot reveal these aspects. It might well be that it is through Perception that Consciousness opens a window out onto the garden of the real but it is a surface based phenomenon and cannot plumb the depths of the matter of an object.

Perception, especially visual perception as a power, takes us on a journey outside of our bodies. The power of attention is a part of this journey and seeks a two-dimensional colour value resting place for the eyes and mobilises other powers to impose a structure on this field, constructing, for example, shapes in space initially independently of any activity of conceptualisation that emanates from the understanding. The question to pose here however, is whether the understanding may be involved in the non-observational awareness the agent has of his own bodily position in space and across time. Bodily awareness uses the media of proprioception and touch. Touch as we know has been appealed to historically as the sense that finally verifies the presence of a seen or heard phenomenon but it too is a surface based phenomenon. We know that Macbeth reaches for the dagger and the absence of contact with the object suffices to remove his hallucination–so much for Moores proof –but it may be improved if the hands could simultaneously touch each other. Kant would of course claim that any such “proof” is impossible and in Socratic spirit would claim that we ought to know what we cannot in principle know and reserve the request for proof to the domain of what can be known.

Proprioception must be related in some way to body-image but as we have seen there are problems with conceptualising this idea of a body-image. OS argues that it is possession of a body-image that enables us to experience two qualitatively identical pains simultaneously in two different hands. He concludes:

“the possession of a body-image must on a number of counts be rated as part of the very foundation of absolutely every form of perception and thus ultimately of consciousness itself.”(P.626)

A conclusion that would not look out of place in the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty(Phenomenology of Perception) which of course is a tribute to the depth of OS’s account. The lived conscious body is certainly the hylomorphic foundation of everything animal and human and the condition of eudaimonia (living a flourishing life). Piaget once proposed a stage theory in which sensory-motor schemata are formed as a preliminary to the operation of thought at both concrete and abstract levels, but this account contained no specific reference to the body-image or proprioception. For Aristotle, the organ and limb system of the animal would be the basis of all perceptual powers but proprioception and body-image are nowhere directly invoked in the way OS envisages. We know OS appears to prefer the Freudian stage model in the creation of his idea of body-image. To the extent that Freud’s reflections rest on hylomorphic grounds this may allow appeals to Aristotelian metaphysics in the justification of OS’s account.

Some theorists have claimed that we have an immediate perceptive knowledge of limb presence and posture(an awareness that does not extend generally to the organs of the body but does extend to the movement of the eyes). It is interesting to note that this awareness of limb posture does not in any way interfere with our visual attendings. Attending to the path of a ball in the context of intending to catch the ball and moving the hand into the correct position is a coordinated integrated undertaking. The attention function of these two different systems do not compete with each other. OS poses the interesting question as to whether, as a result of the above considerations, we have to rule out the possibility that we are conscious, via an act of perception, of the position and posture of our bodies. OS argues that this is not the case and that there is no contradiction involved in the idea of the non observational form of awareness we have of our body position and posture. He wonders whether proprioception is a sixth sense given his argument that proprioception cannot be reduced to touch. From an earlier work on the Will we recall that proprioception does not involve any introspective involution of visual attention upon the limb engaged in an action: this form of attention, we saw served to destroy the structure of the action. These different types of attention cannot be coordinated and integrated. OS argues in his later work that the coordination of attention is best illustrated in the example of playing a stroke in tennis. Here he argues most of our attention is focussed upon the speed and direction of the ball but there is also some left over for the proprioceptive awareness of the moving arm: an awareness that would be registered in the short-term memory system of the tennis player. What we encounter here is a unity of the elements of looking, proprioceptive awareness, and the striking of the ball.

OS distinguishes between an experience related short-term body-image associated with a kind of primitive self he terms “i” and a long term body image that is associated with an “I” or a more complex self that has innate characteristics(presumably of a hylomorphic kind). It is not clear, however, whether this I is “psychological non mental” or “psychological mental” insofar as his architectonic is concerned. OS appears to rest his case(as William James did) on focusing upon the cerebral cause rather than at the level of what he termed the “psychological”. The isolation of the brain from the other organs such as the eyes and disregard of the fact that the brain does not in fact belong to the body-image leaves this question hanging in the air. Psuche is the root of our word psychological. The moorings to the Kantian “I think” also seemed to have been loosened. on OS’s account. Kant’s account of the unity of apperception and the will placed our human form of consciousness at a different level to the consciousness of animals(who also have brains). The dawning of a psychical distance between oneself and the environment was attributed by Kant to the “I think” actualising in a developmental process. The implication of this reflection is that affective impulses on their way to the motor system are hindered by a will in the spirit of “I ought not to..” and thus appears to allow the space for an “I” that possesses a long term body image. We are not provided with any reflections relating to ethical actions and judgements in OS’s essentially analytic presentation.

The brain, argues the brain researcher Edelman, is the most complex object in the universe. Surely, it can be argued that this could be the site of the “I” considering its relation to the limbs, thought and language. Language centres have been mapped in the brain and we can see the trace of ancient reptile and mammal brains in our brain suggesting once again the hierarchy of levels of activity Hughlings Jackson proposed. These “lower structures” might have brought some innate knowledge with them. Chomsky suggested that the language centres of the brain also were related to innate knowledge , e.g. universal grammar. He was fascinated by the phenomenon that we appear to be able to produce completely unique sentences that we have never heard before. He raised the question of whether one could have learned to structure sentences into subject-predicate without some kind of predisposition toward extracting rules and algorithms from the stream of discourse we are exposed to early on in life. The form of the sentence in which I think something about something, e.g. “Athens behaved unjustly toward Socrates” has a categorical structure that we do not find in the naming of something: this structure expresses a thought about something when we are thinking conceptually. The name Athens is either used correctly or not and whilst it may summarise a manifold of representations it does not express any truth about Athens. We know that theoretical rationality as expressed in arguments rests upon the truth of the components of those arguments, namely propositions. We also know that practical rationality as expressed by Aristotle in the act of the implementation of laws also rests upon certain truths, e.g. “All activity aims at the Good”(Opening of Nichomachean Ethics). For Kant the categorical structure of judgements follow the principles of logic(noncontradiction, sufficient reason) and these are a priori(independent of experience). How these categories relate to Language is however not clear. Wittgenstein claimed he was engaging in grammatical investigations and he used logical principles in these investigations as well as categories such as potentiality and actuality. The Wittgensteinian “turn” however involved emphasis upon practical forms of life in which language is embedded, and in this respect it became obvious that Aristotelian Categories such as “Having”, “Acting” and “Being Affected” became more relevant when determining the meaning of practical judgements. The relevance of the “I” in relation to such categories emerges as an important element. Truth is perhaps converted to truthfulness in the context of first person avowals and the issue of self-knowledge is raised. Human beings as agents that “have” or possess powers and that can have the status of being potential or actualised becomes one important focus of Wittgensteinian Philosophy. Kant, we know found Aristotle’s categories to be essentially rhapsodic and spent much time revising them with his “tables of judgement”. There is in fact a partial acknowledgement of the importance of Kantian Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s claim that his method had much in common with the method employed in Critical Philosophy. Theoretically, the role of language in relation to thought and the “I”, perhaps in the light of our current knowledge, is not clear, and perhaps the best articulation of our present knowledge was given above by James:

“But it is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, association, judgement, and volition.”

Its essential relations to rationality also ought to be mentioned. Language was certainly the medium of thought for those ancient Greeks who claimed that thinking was essentially speaking to oneself.

In his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” Kant reiterates his view that animals do not possess an “I” that thinks. We know that on OS’s account animals have a body-image but the questions then arises as to whether they only possess a short term body image which is connected to a more primitive “i”. This would mean that the animal “i” is more instinctive. From Freud we learned that the instincts express the body to the mind and one of the first tasks of the Ego, we know was to protect the body. Animal instincts have sources. objects and aims but a question arises as to whether the aims of their instincts can be changed or whether they are immutable. There is also the question of the death instinct which could aim at the extinction of the life that sustains all activity and builds civilisations: is this a contradiction that complex beings such as humans “suffer” from or do they “will” to destroy what is Good. Is this a characteristic of the “I” that thinks?