The History of Psychology and the History of Consciousness: Introduction to criticism and commentary of Harari’s “Homo Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”: Part Two( Kant and Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy).

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The previous excursion into the territory of William James’s “Principles of Psychology” in part one demonstrated that the combination of concerns for retaining a commitment to a modern view of science together with a commitment to retain the concept of “consciousness” did not succeed in either satisfying the philosophers demand to understand the intentions and point of the new discipline of Psychology, or in satisfying the expectations of the breakaway pioneers to advance the state of knowledge with respect to human beings. James was criticized by philosophers from many different schools especially the followers of Aristotle and Kant but in fact, the most severe criticism of James’s position came from within the ranks of the pioneers of the new movement. It was believed that retention of the concept of “consciousness” resulted in insufficient attention being paid to what can be observed and measured. James’s physiological and biological reflections tempted many in an act of counter-revolution to follow the path of Pavlov in his attempt to manipulate stimuli and responses. Many who followed this path including John Watson even went so far as to deny the existence of the concept of consciousness on the grounds that it cannot be observed. Consciousness was, they argued, a so-called epiphenomenon like the sound of a harp which issues from its vibrating strings, contributing absolutely nothing to the rate of vibration of the strings. Scientists should ignore the aesthetic impression of the harmonious sounds of the instrument and pay exclusive attention to the variables of the cause of the vibrations and the frequency of the vibrations. The music of the soul was not for these pioneers who meant business with their new subject. This state of affairs reflected a growing sense of dissatisfaction with “modern” philosophy which is shared by the author of “Homo Sapiens: a brief history of mankind” and Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow”. Philosophers of classical persuasion, observing this phenomenon of obsession with physical nature were amazed at the myopia of a method that sought to analyze human life into the variables of stimulus and response. What was on the minds of these philosophers? They were certainly not impressed with the methods of the new pioneers but what did they think about the task of advancing knowledge of the human being? In answer to this let us briefly review the last great Philosophical attempt to provide us with knowledge of the human being before “modern philosophy” (in the form of Descartes and Hobbes and their followers) eroded the gains in the form of the knowledge we experienced from Aristotle and the Enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant was the most influential Enlightenment philosopher and his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” helped to separate a particular concern for the human being from more general epistemological and metaphysical interests whilst at the same time retaining a connection to the major principles and laws of these more general areas of reflection. When we look at the reflections of William James and the writings of the physiological and biologically oriented behaviourists we can note the presence and concern with the idea of the cognitive in the former and the absence of this concern in the latter counter-revolutionaries. Let us, therefore, ask what Kant meant by the term “cognitive”. What he meant can be pictured as a triangle of the powers of the human mind, with the apex of the triangle representing the theoretical operation of reason in its search for complete explanation in terms of the principles of non contradiction and sufficient reason and immediately below that the practical operation of reason that is involved in two kinds of tasks: firstly the performance of instrumental tasks(where means to ends are calculated) and secondly the selection of final ends in accordance with the universal law of the categorical imperative. The next level is that of the categories of the understanding which provide guidance for the operation of judgment at the base of the triangle. This base borders the more sensible aspects of the mind which house sensations, imagination, and the intuitions of space and time. The faculty of Reason, of course, is integrated with the categories of the understanding which many philosophers have likened unto a system of rules. Insofar as these rules belong both to the theoretical and the practical sphere they can be separated. Theoretical rules combine and separate concepts in order to generate the truth-value of our statements. Practical rules are used by the understanding to regulate action(both the means to ends and the ends themselves). When all these powers of the mind or “faculties” as Kant called them, were being used optimally we then encounter the Enlightenment ideal of the citizen of a cosmopolitan world which the species of man is in the process of striving to achieve.The higher cognitive faculties were, then, theoretical and practical reason, theoretical and practical understanding and judgment whose major task in relation to reality was to subsume the particulars we encounter under more general ideas or concepts. The lower faculties were those that were on the border with judgment and which were used in relation to the pre-conceptual organization of our sensory encounters with the world or ourselves, namely the work of the attention and the imagination and the intuitions of space and time in our organizations of these sensations. Kant specifically talks about the operation of this lower faculty in similar terms to Aristotle when he states that representations of sensations are created by the faculty of attention and imagination to produce intuitions which are then subjected to a process of abstraction that attempts to obtain common elements in order to form a concept(a rule for the combination of representations). This, in its turn, is organized by a reflective faculty which then combines or separates these concepts for the purposes of producing a cognition of the state of affairs represented(a synthesis which Heidegger called the truth making or veritative synthesis). The question relating to the role of consciousness in the aforementioned operations is a difficult one. James, when he talks about language and the perching and resting places of a narrative of sentences is perhaps thinking about a fictional or descriptive narrative when he says that sensorial imaginings supervene at the full stop. Fictional and descriptive narratives do not have universal intent aiming at truth and knowledge but are rather particular descriptions about particular states of affairs that might either be actual but also might be purely fictional and imagined. Consciousness is certainly involved in these sensorial imaginings but it is also involved in the formation of truths as O´ Shaughnessy points out in his work “Consciousness and the World”. The difference between the two forms of consciousness here is probably the differences between its operation in the lower and higher cognitive faculties respectively. Another example of the workings of consciousness in the higher faculties was actually given in James’s account when he talked about the attempt of an agent to find the right conception for their action. It was not entirely clear exactly what he meant by “conception” here, however. A more complex example can be found in the work of Kant who in his work discusses how the search for the reason for an action is a search not just for the truth of such a statement about the reason for the action but also a search for what is good or valuable about actions that have universal intent.Consciousness is a peripheral term in Kant’s thought but we can find this passage in his Anthropology:

“Experience is empirical cognition, but cognition(since it rests on judgments requires reflection(reflexio) and consequently consciousness of activity in combining the manifold of ideas according to a rule of the unity of the manifold: that is, it requires concepts and thought in general(as distinct from intuition). Thus consciousness is divided into discursive consciousness(which as logical consciousness must lead the way since it gives the rule)and intuitive consciousness.”(p32)

Here Kant is drawing attention to a distinction (not found in James) between “I” as a thinking being and “I” as a sensing being. In the latter, I cognize myself only as I appear to myself in intuition(in time) without any concept involved. In this realm, we find my sensations and their causes and consequences. Narratives, fictional and factual, are the means in the language we have to represent these types of states of affairs. In the former, I cognize myself objectively as I am(in truth) in my essence. This is the “I” that thinks and the importance of the higher cognitive faculty is clearly seen in Kant’s insistence that the “I think” accompanies all my representations, indicating the superior power of thought to organize sensations over, for example, the imagination which would clearly be involved in fictional and descriptive narratives. In the higher cognitive faculty, understanding and reason seek not a description but an explanation, the concern of all “philosophical” science.

There is involved in the above account a major distinction between sensation and concept which is sometimes clear and sometimes obscure in James’ reflections. In Harari we also see this confusion between the operation of cognition in the higher and lower cognitive faculties. This is especially prominent in his reflections on the role of imagination and its imagined role in the formation of human rights, scientific theorizing etc. This distinction between the sensation as something which happens to us and the concept which is something that we actively create is used in O´Shaughnessy’s work “The Will: a dual aspect theory”. In this work, the author claims an ontological distinction between the active parts of our mind connected to our wills where I consciously decide to do something and the parts of my mind in which sensations “passively” happen to me. This is in accordance with Kantian Philosophical Psychology as represented by the cognitive triangle above.

The followers of Aristotle and Kant have throughout the ages carried on with their slow painstaking work to create, maintain, and preserve the integrity of an abstract form of theorising in the face of first, the onslaught of Christianity to return to more concrete forms of reflection and then secondly the Philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes and their followers who also wished for a return to more concrete forms of experience. In part one we saw how psychology and the work of William James reflected this yearning for a return to the tribunal of experience to settle abstract philosophical issues.

On the continent of Europe this populistic movement made itself felt in Philosophy in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty who in the name of Philosophy revolted against the tendency of Science to reduce experience to elements these philosophers regarded as products of methodology and theory, products that ignored the principles of the mind or consciousness.

In an essay entitled “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man”, Merleau-Ponty refers to Husserl’s claim that the sciences were in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. He notes that Husserl had pointed out that Psychology, Sociology, and History were all distorting their missions by invoking external causes in order to explain the nature of phenomena that, in contrast, needed explanation in terms of intention and meaning. As a consequence, it was maintained, the sciences of man were fragmenting into their own respective territories of psychologism, sociologism and historicism. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty claims:

“saw that these different disciplines had entered into a permanent state of crisis which would never be overcome unless one could show by a new account of their mutual relations and their methods of knowing, not only how each alone might be possible but how all three might exist together. It must be shown that science is possible, that the sciences of man are possible, and that philosophy is possible.”(“Phenomenology, Language, and Sociology”, p228)

Husserl, in a sense, was merely giving voice to the classical Kantian view that explanation in terms of appearances and their external causes were only one kind of legitimate explanation. In spite of its legitimacy, this kind of explanation was insufficient to explain the wider world of intention and meaning that inhabited our experiences of phenomena. Husserl was, of course, a “modern” Philosopher, critical of Kant and all rationalists who wished to maintain with Aristotle that man was essentially a rational animal capable of discourse. His complaint was mainly that these rationalists were guilty of what he called logicism when they invoked the principle of non-contradiction and sufficient reason to explain phenomena. We know that both Kant and Aristotle shared the conviction that theoretical reason and its “logic” was the highest form of explanation governing even practical reason and the ethical virtues amongst which one could find the virtue of a lawmaker formulating and passing laws with universal intent. For Kant however, his categorical imperative also had a universal intent and it together with these laws of the law-maker would ensure a progress of mankind to a kingdom of ends in which men would be cosmopolitan citizens treating each other with the respect each deserved. The reasoning involved when they did so would obey the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. Husserl called this logicism but beyond that accusation and the claim that neither Aristotle nor Kant could give sufficient accounts of the essence of phenomena we do not have details of his motivations for breaking with traditional rationalism.

It is clear, however, that he felt that his response to the crisis in the European Sciences required a rejection of Kant and development of a “method” to supplant the scientific method. This method would allow psychology and the other sciences to continue their inductively based observationalist activity of collecting the facts. The method would navigate a course between psychologism and logicism. Merleau-Ponty describes Husserlian Phenomenology in terms of gathering the experiences of man and all knowledge of his life and communal existence that reveal a meaning or what he calls an “intrinsic truth”.

We see here a manifestation of James’s spirit, a desire to return to attempting to understand life and civilization by the easy route of examining our experience, its phenomena, and conditions. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty we need an account of the lifeworld before we explore the higher world of cognitive rationality that might not, according to them, even exist in any significant sense. Merleau-Ponty’s view of Phenomenology is given in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception”. Here he claims that the so-called phenomenological method is an inquiry which is based on our experiences of the world that is determined not to categorize us as biological, psychological or sociological objects woven into a tapestry of causes. Merleau-Ponty insists that we are the first-person, conscious source of the phenomena of the world. Phenomenology commits itself to description rather than the types of explanation we are familiar with in the philosophies of Aristotle and Kant.

Here we have all bets placed on consciousness and the method of phenomenology and it was a counter-revolution to what Harari called the scientific revolution that itself was rooted in a much earlier cognitive revolution that began with the dawn of consciousness around 1200 bc(not as Harari claims ca 70,000 years ago). This cognitive revolution, in turn, gave rise to the Philosophical Psychology of Aristotle and the conception of man as a rational animal capable of discourse. Aristotle’s conception of the first principles of Philosophy acknowledged the importance of all kinds of explanation: logical, conceptual and causal. The method and “discoveries” of phenomenology mean however to disavow such origins and even mean to disavow the relevance of the Kantian evolution of Aristotle’s position. Given the fact that Psychology had in its reaction to William James and his followers evolved into behaviourism, phenomenology was a worthy adversary to the position that denied even the existence of consciousness. Consider this description of reflex behaviour from Merleau-Ponty in his work “The Structure of Behaviour”:

“If I am in a dark room and a luminous spot appears on the wall and moves along it, I would say that it has “attracted” my attention, that I have turned my eyes “toward” it and that in all its movements it “pulls” my regard along with it. Grasped from the inside, my behaviour appears as directed, as gifted with an intention and a meaning. Science seems to demand that we reject these characteristics as appearances under which a reality of another kind must be discovered. It will be said that seen light is “only in us”. It covers a vibratory movement, which movement is never given to consciousness. Let us call qualitative appearance, “phenomenal light”: the vibratory movement, “real light”. Since the real light is never perceived, it could not present itself as a goal toward which my behaviour is directed. It can only be conceptualized as a cause which acts on my organism.”(p7)

This invocation of Aristotelian teleology to prove the limitations of behaviourist description and explanation is somewhat ironic resting as it does on a kind of rationality which phenomenology must reject given its criticism of logicism. The reference, however, to intention and meaning in the above account is what is truly revolutionary. In the scientific view of consciousness, there is always the risk of dividing holistically experienced phenomena into cause and effect thus creating the impossibility of unification: cause and effect are logically and conceptually independent of each other. The concepts of intention and meaning refuse such a division of holistic phenomena into its “atoms” but there may nevertheless be a division of a different kind.

Merleau-Ponty refers in the comments about Husserl above to “intrinsic truth”. This truth is rooted in conceptual meaning yet it is also rooted in the lived facts of the situation and these together are what make possible the idea of consciousness we encounter here. Experiencing the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven is not just experiencing a collection of facts but rather the experience of an essence or universal meaning. Consciousness is capable of experiencing these essences, the essences of intentional objects, it is asserted. The subject possessing this consciousness is situated in the world with its stimuli and causes but it also thinks this world and in this sense transcends it, transforming the world into an intentional object. This has implications for Psychology:

“Consciousness is accessible only to intentional analysis and not to mere factual observation. The psychologist always tends to make consciousness into just such an object of observation…Psychology, like physics and the other sciences of nature, uses the method of induction which starts from the facts and assembles them. But it is very evident that this induction will remain blind if we do not know in some other way, and indeed from the inside of consciousness itself, what this induction is dealing with.”(Philosophy, Language and Sociology, p242)

This combination of induction with the reflective knowledge consciousness has of itself requires a phenomenological approach if the facts ascertained by the process of induction are to have meaning. Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were friends and colleagues. Sartre was also influenced by the phenomenological tradition and used the method to analyze the phenomenon of the imagination which was emerging as a cognitive faculty of significance in the phenomenological account of man. (The imagination is also a faculty of significance in Harari’s works). Sartre argues that all experimentation in relation to the power of imagination remains ambiguous whilst the search is directed toward the physical conditions which give rise to images in the mind–images that are regarded as schematic outlines accompanying our thought or carrying symbolic references to particular objects. Merleau-Ponty supports Sartre in this position and agrees that phenomenology seeks to understand what an image is in terms of its relation to thought but he perhaps places even more emphasis on the question of what affect the predominance of the imagination has in the life of those for whom this is true. He also wonders what role imagination as such has in the life of man, the so-called “rational animal”.

We should recall the reflections of James in this context and his reference to the fact that images are of absent objects and also his insistence that this picturing of absent objects is an activity of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty refers to Alain’s observation that we cannot count the pillars of the Pantheon when we imagine it. This, of course, helps us to distinguish this form of consciousness from the perceptual form in which counting the pillars would be possible but it does not reveal its essence. Sartre in the first part of his work on the “Psychology of the Imagination” claims that imagining is an operation of consciousness which pretends to itself that the object imagined is present. He also claims that his definition means that the conscious subject is involved with nothingness: it is consciousness in the face of nothingness that arises because man is a questioning being, questioning for example whether Pierre is in the café when he is not. This, according to Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenological analysis and it is this type of reflection that should be used to understand the meaning of experimentation in this realm.

Sartre also relates the imagination to desire. On page 141 of the “Psychology of the Imagination” he claims:

“The act of imagination is a magical one. It is an incantation destined to produce an object of thought, the thing one desires, in such a way that one can take possession of it.”

Here it appears as if the act is connected to a wish fulfillment that has no connection with the kind of perceptual contact we have with an object that can result in investigations into the number of columns the Pantheon has, to take an example. The type of reaction to the image is the type of reaction connected to a wish rather than the type of reaction to reality involved in the perception of objects like the Pantheon. Freud clearly situated the wish in the realm of the pleasure-pain principle that regulated the play of sensations in consciousness and the eventual fate of these sensations, if accompanied by too much pleasure or too much pain. Freud charted the course of a patients fantasies and dreams using this principle, which, in relation to our cognitive triangle fell outside the scope of those powers that functioned in accordance with what he called the reality principle, the true concern of consciousness and the method of psychoanalysis. The problem that many of the patients of Freud faced was that the power of their imagination usurped the place of the power of their understanding and reason–the bearers of the reality principle–thus disturbing the balance of their minds. This position is countered by the analytical tradition of Philosophy that has close connections with Kantian thought. Here it is maintained that the imagination can, in fact, play a cognitive role in our lives through the imagination of hypothetical states of affairs such as “Pierre is in the café”(when he is not). Here, thought is directed to the category of the possible which reality reveals not to be actual and this, in turn, brings about the subsequent judgment that “It is false that Pierre is in the café”. Here the analytical philosophers clearly see a theoretically cognitive role for the imagination.

It is perhaps important to point out at this stage of the argument that Aristotelian Philosophical Psychology and the Kantian cognitive triangle would not deny all the descriptions of phenomenology or psychoanalysis. The mind has depths that classical and Kantian theories did not concern themselves with. The distinction they would have insisted had paramount importance in Psychology, however, is between what happens to the mind and what the mind does in a free and spontaneous active mode or operation. Both Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis earned the admiration of followers of the classical and Kantian traditions because it broke the stranglehold that science had taken on the humanistic subjects, fragmenting them into a plethora of strictly compartmented disciplines each with its own special interest to be defended in the marketplace of the sciences. This can be seen in the work of Sartre who tries to integrate phenomena that are drifting apart in the scientific environment. After suggesting a relation between imagination and emotion, Sartre then presents a phenomenological investigation of Emotion in his work “Sketch for a theory of the emotions”. This analysis is important Sartre argues because the inductive approach of science reveals two separate realms of facts: so-called “corporeal manifestations” and “representations” and concentrating on either of these two sets of facts merely results in removing us from the phenomena of emotion as we “live” them. He criticizes James’ theory of the emotions when it appears to argue that my joy as a state of consciousness is nothing but the consciousness of physiological or corporeal manifestations. In arriving at such a position James is guilty, Sartre argues, of leaving the psyche out of the study of psychology. Also, he argues, since these physiological events in virtue of being physical, are unconscious, this calls into question whether James has assumed the concept of consciousness in his theory without fully motivating it theoretically. Sartre, in this work, praises psychoanalysis and draws attention to the fact that:

“psychoanalysis was the first to lay emphasis upon the significance of psychic facts: that is, it was the first to insist upon the fact that every state of consciousness stands for something other than itself.”(Sketch for a theory of the emotions, p50)

Phenomenological eidetic reflection shares this fundamental insight and asks of the phenomenon of emotion, for example, “What is its meaning?”. Merleau-Ponty supports the Sartrean project by reiterating that emotion is an act of consciousness which has a relation to the entire world. Both agree that the dualistic division of man into what is physical and what is psychic leads inevitably to the dead-end question of which is the cause of the other. Better to ask, Marleau-Ponty insists, what emotion means in man’s lived relation to the world.

Sartre elaborates upon his analysis and claims that emotion, insofar as we regard it as a way of responding to the world, is connected to the imagination and the wish and ignores causal relations embedded in reality, preferring instead to magically transform its world into something it wishes it to be.
Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would have felt sympathetic to Husserl’s resolution of the problem of the relation of Phenomenology to Psychology. Husserl claims that the relation is that of form to content and whilst Psychology might provide us with a myriad of facts about the space of the world we live in, we must turn to phenomenology to find the answer to a question such as “What is space?”Phenomenology will provide us with essences–the universal nature of the phenomena it investigates. In this context, Husserl provides us with a number of insights on the relations between induction, imagination and scientific activity. Merleau-Ponty summarizes the matter in the essay “Phenomenology, Language and Sociology”. Husserl, he claims, is opposed to two aspects of the traditional theory of induction. Firstly the aspect with respect to which we, in reflecting upon a group of facts and abstracting a common character regard this abstraction as something essential. Husserl quite rightly regarded this with skepticism and in doing so found himself in agreement with Aristotle, a state of affairs he might not have been completely comfortable with. Aristotle’s view of this inductive process was more conceptually oriented and involved an abstraction of a concept from an examination of “states of affairs”(not facts, as was asserted above, which are already conceptualized phenomena). Secondly, the aspect of Classical causal induction was also rejected by Husserl. This has been described as a process which enables us to pick out from a number of antecedents the factor that is responsible for causing the phenomenon we see before us. Both Aristotle and Kant would have supported this aspect of induction but Husserl claims that this characterization is not coherent.

What then is induction and how is it related to the imagination? Galileo, Husserl maintains did not engage in this process of abstracting from a number of examples but instead imagined a concept of the fall of bodies that in fact guided his experimentation–a conception which, Husserl claims, has not been abstracted from the facts. He notes that the empirical facts do not support the concept and introduces additional conditions such as friction and resistance to explain the difference between the facts and the imagined concept. It is via this process of imagination that scientists read off the essence of phenomena. Husserl also invokes the single experiment of Davy that established the existence of potassium to prove induction is not a collection of a vast number of cases, but rather a method for applying a group of concepts imagined and real to the relevant phenomena. This account also fits the way Newton arrived at the law of gravitation in his theory, bringing together such diverse facts as the orbiting of heavenly bodies around larger bodies and the apple falling from the tree to the earth. Newton was certainly attempting to find the essence of gravitation. Husserl claims, in relation to examples such as these, that the intuition of essences is based not just on the facts but on what he calls the “free variation” of certain facts. This occurs by imagining a phenomenon and then in or with our imaginations trying to imagine all possible modifications of the phenomenon. Whatever remains constant or endures through these changes is the essence of the phenomenon. Here the individual “fact” is considered “hypothetically” and not “grasped as a reality”, whatever this may mean. Husserl may here be confusing a fact which is a true belief about a state of affairs with a state of affairs that indeed can be imagined to vary by imagining a variation of causes or conditions. A state of affairs is real and a fact is conceptual: it is a relation of a number of concepts in a statement which refers to a state of affairs or a number of states of affairs. A state of affairs is made up of actual things or objects in relation to each other.

So, the idea of an imaginary variation of the facts can only mean imagining the facts not to be true but this by definition of what a fact is is not possible. In addition, some essences are facts which are necessarily true and it must follow that such an imaginary negation of the fact or facts cannot possibly reveal the essence of a thing. Now some scientists like Harari also believe that the imagination can do what is logically impossible and “vary the facts” and this attitude is probably inspired by Phenomenology that in its attempt to alleviate the crisis of the European sciences merely added yet another problematic dimension to this sorrow-laden state of affairs. Other scientists inspired by perhaps a combination of phenomenology and quantum physics will deny that their theories carry truths about the states of affairs they are investigating. These scientists claim to be providing “models” of reality which will inevitably be replaced by other better “models that will function more pragmatically insofar as evaluating and conducting experiments is concerned. Many phenomenologists and traditional followers of Aristotle and Kant have complained about this scientific obsession with methodology and Husserl would no doubt have been surprised to learn that his theorizing actually reinforced the aforementioned form of pragmatic functionalism. For the followers of Aristotle and Kant, this was not a surprising result considering the lack of concern with the traditional cognitive triangle we referred to earlier.

Merleau-Ponty initially appears to differentiate himself from both Husserl and Sartre by introducing a study of speech in his phenomenological investigations. he notes, rather ironically in the present context, that the patient suffering from aphasia has:

“lost the general ability to subsume a sensory given under a category, that he has lapsed from the categorical to the concrete attitude.”

An interesting diagnosis by a phenomenologist whom the traditional philosopher believes is guilty of the same “lapse”. The phenomenologist has flattened our cognitive traditional cognitive triangle of the powers of the mind in its retreat from the so-called abstract theory of knowledge to the more modern concrete imaginative attitude. This criticism should be borne in mind when we are asked to evaluate Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to “reduce” language to the user of a language in a speech situation expressing himself. This, of course, is according to Merleau-Ponty a far better method than an observationalist third-person account of phenomena which has ignored the life-world aspect involved in the operation of the powers of perception, emotion and the imagination. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are striving to provide arguments against the learned observers view of language embedded in a linguistic past that made language possible and both philosophers are instead striving to provide arguments for a speaking subject oriented toward the future and the task of communicating some kind of message which, according to this theory, has no relation to the truth. It is rightly pointed out that the speaker cannot relate to the language they are speaking as they would to an object, and yet their words relate in some manner to reality. Phenomenology cannot explain how this phenomenon of a speaker speaking relates to what we know, namely, that we understand another person by understanding the truth of what they say. Understanding, of course, comes from the higher regions of the cognitive triangle that the phenomenologists reject and it is these regions of the triangle which are needed to explain the truth function of language or thought.

All attempts to concretize the operations of consciousness appear to do so at the expense of its relation to the world, at the expense of its true thought about the world. Analytical Philosophy with its early commitment to the methodology and assumptions of science also initially had a problematic relation to language and consciousness but that early tendency was neutralized by the recantation by Wittgenstein of his earlier work and the “turn” his philosophizing took when he returned to more traditional philosophical investigations of these areas. In part three we will attempt to provide an analysis of the concept of consciousness from the perspective of Analytical philosophy.