Hume – Maverick Philosopher

More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness. I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat. How does the Humean* account for one's awareness of being aware? He could say, plausibly, that the primary object-directed awareness is a subject-less awareness. But he can't plausibly say that the secondary awareness is subject-less. For if both the primary awareness (the awareness of the cat) and the secondary awareness (the awareness of the primary awareness) are subject-less, then what makes the secondary awareness an awareness of the primary awareness? What connects them? The two awarenesses cannot just occur; they must occur in the same subject, in the same unity of consciousness.

Suppose that in Socrates there is an awareness of a cat, and in God there is an awareness of Socrates' awareness of a cat. Those two awarenesses would not amount to there being in Socrates an awareness of a cat together with a simultaneous secondary awareness of being aware of a cat. But it is phenomenologically evident that the two awarenesses do co-occur. We ought to conclude that the two awarenesses must be together in one subject, where the subject is not the physical thing in the external world (the animal that wears Socrates' toga, for example), but the I, the self, the subject.

What I have just done is provide phenomenological evidence of the existence of the self that Hume claimed he could not find. Does it follow that this (transcendental) self is a simple substance that can exist on its own without a material body? That's a further question. To put it another way: do considerations anent the unity of consciousness furnish materials for a proof of the simplicity, and thus the immortality, of a substantial soul? Proof or paralogism?

__________

*A Humean for present purposes is one who denies that there is a self or subject that is aware; there is just awareness of this or that. Hume, Sartre, and Butchvarov are Humeans in this sense.

Modus Trollens

The modus operandi of the cyberpunk.

Hume and Kant on Sense Perception

Another round with Ed Buckner who writes,

Meanwhile I continue to struggle through Kant, and I point out what seems to be a fundamental and insuperable difficulty below. (I may be wrong).

Start with Hume, and with what he means by ‘impressions’. As I write, I am looking at what I take to be the black surface of my desk. Note “what I take to be”. Assume that what I take to be the surface is the surface. But what then does Hume mean by an ‘impression’? He says “Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul”. Ideas are ‘the faint images’ of the impressions in thinking and reasoning.

This is not clear at all. By ‘impression’ Hume means either that which I (perhaps wrongly) take to be the surface of the desk, or something else. Suppose the former. Hume makes it clear that the impression makes its appearance in the soul, and it is clear from everything he says later that an impression is a mental item. But the desk is not a mental item, hence the surface of the desk is not a mental item. Which is absurd.

Or he means the latter. Then the ‘impression’ must be something other than what I take to be the surface of the desk. But I am aware of no such thing. In looking at the desk I am aware of nothing corresponding to a perception which enters “with force and violence”. Nor, when I shut my eyes and think of the surface of the desk, am I aware of anything but a faint memory of seeing the surface itself, rather than the faint image of any ‘impression’.

So both interpretations are problematic. Either my desk and its surface are mental items, which is absurd. Or it is impossible to say what Hume means by ‘impression’. So Hume’s position makes no sense.

I agree with the above analysis. It is clear and convincing. We can also display the problem in my preferred way as an aporetic polyad, in this case a tetrad:

1) Impressions are mental items.

2) The surfaces of physical things are not mental items.

3) What we know when we have sensory knowledge are impressions.

4) We have sensory knowledge of the surfaces of physical things.

These propositions are collectively inconsistent. So at least one of them must be rejected. As I read Hume, he is committed to (1), (3), and (4), and so he must reject (2). But this leads to a subjective idealism that both Ed and I find intolerable. No physical thing such as Ed's desk is a bundle of sense impressions. Sense impressions are 'in the mind' and no desk or part thereof is in anyone's mind.

The Humean solution is worse than the problem. Another solution is to reject (3). One might hold a representational theory of mind according to which what we know via the outer senses are, in the typical non-illusory cases, mind-independent things and some of their parts, but we know them via mental representations. Enter the epistemic intermediary: contents in the mind mediate between mind and external thing.

There are other putative solutions such as Husserl's and Butchvarov's. They too have their difficulties. I won't go into them because Ed hasn't read these philosophers.

The next question is whether Kant’s position makes any sense, given that his position here seems closely connected with that of Hume. He speaks of ‘sensible sensations’, ‘the world of the senses’, ‘the field of appearances’ etc etc. What does he mean by these terms? Does he mean the sorts of things that e.g. I take to be parts of material objects? But then it seems to follow from everything else he says that either material objects are mental items, or that I am wrong in thinking that what I take to be part of a material object, is in fact such. Both positions are absurd.

Have I misunderstood Kant?

To assimilate Kant to Hume is a mistake. There are many crucial differences between the two. For one thing, Kant is not a subjective idealist. He does not hold that physical things are bundles of impressions. He would reject (3) in the tetrad above. To explain this is impossible in a few sentences. I refer Ed to Kant's Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772 which may help.

There is also the following excerpt from a different entry:

Kant

I think Ed is wrong above about Kant. For Kant, the pure is the opposite of the empirical. Every concept is either pure or empirical and no concept is both. A pure concept is one that is not drawn from experience, ein solcher der nicht von der Erfahrung abgezogen ist, but originates from the understanding in respect of both form and content, sondern auch dem Inhalte nach aus dem Verstande entspringt. The form of all concepts, including pure concepts, arises from reflexion Reflexion, and thus from the understanding. Empirical concepts arise from the senses, entspringen aus den Sinnen, by comparison of the objects of experience. Their content comes from the senses, and their form of universality, Form der Allgemeinheit, alone from the understanding.

If Buckner is telling us that Kant's pure-empirical distinction runs parallel to Zabarella's first intention-second intention distinction, then that can't be right. For Zabarella's animal and human being, which are first intentions for him, count as empirical concepts for Kant.

Any comparison of Zabarella (1533-1589) the Aristotelian and Kant is bound to be fraught with difficulty because of the transcendental-subjective turn of modern philosophy commencing with Descartes (1596-1650). For Aristotle, the categories are categories of a real world independent of our understanding; for Kant, the categories are precisely categories of the understanding (Verstandeskategorien) grounded in the understanding both in their form and in their content. The categories of Aristotle are thus objective, categories belonging to a world to be understood, and not subjective, categories whereby a mind understands the world.

Pure Concepts of Reason as Limit Concepts

Kant also speaks in his Logic and elsewhere of Ideas which are pure concepts of reason, Vernunft, and not of understanding, Verstand. Die Idee ist ein Vernunftbegriff deren Gegenstand gar nicht in der Erfahrug kann angetroffen werden. (Logik, sec. 3) The objects of these pure concepts of reason cannot be known by us because our form of intuition, Anschauung, is sensible, not intellectual. We can know only phenomena, not noumena. Among these Ideas, which are plainly limit concepts, are God, the soul, the world-whole, and freedom. And they are not merely negative limit concepts. Free will, for example, is objectively real despite its not being obejctively knowable. But more on this later.

The Strange Thought of Absolute Nothingness

I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel.

The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either! And then the strangeness supervened as the boy lay in bed staring at the ceiling. There would then have been nothing, absolutely nothing! How strange!

The giddiness arose by a double subtraction. The boy subtracted creation leaving only God. Then he subtracted God leaving only nothing. The boy was innocent of philosophy and nothing from that field impeded the supervenience of strangeness as he tried to apprehend this 'nothing.'

'Necessary being' was not in the ten-year-old's vocabulary. The nonexistence of God is impossible if God is a necessary being. And surely the ens realissimum, the ens absolutum, the apha and omega of the alphabet of Being, could not be a merely contingent being. That much seems very clear to the old man.

Unfortunately, the divine necessity is not transparent to our intellects. We cannot see into the divine necessity. We have no INsight in this instance. We cannot see with indubitable evidence that God exists and cannot not exist. Why not? I conjecture that it is because of the structure of the discursive intellect.

We think in opposites. In the present case, the opposites are essence and existence. We say that in God, essence entails existence, or essence is (identically) existence, or it is the nature of God to exist. Or perhaps we say, as I recall Saint Bonaventura saying, that if God is God, then God exists: the divine self-identity entails the divine existence. But the sense of these claims rests on the logically prior distinction of essence and existence as two opposing factors that the discursive intellect must keep apart if it is to think clearly. And so the very sense of the claims militates against apodictic insight into their truth.

We cannot help but bring the distinction between essence and existence to God when we try to think about him. This distinction that we cannot help but bring prevents us from rendering the divine necessity transparent to our intellects in such a way that we cannot doubt the existence of God. The objects of the finite intellect are finitized objects in which essence and existence fall asunder. They are objects among objects subject to distinctions among distinctions. God or the ens absolutum cannot but be a finitized object to our ectypal intellects. God himself, however, is nothing finite, no object among objects, no token of a type, no instance of an eidos. We cannot get what want: objective certainty of the existence of the Absolute in which there is such a tight coalescence between the intellect and its Infinite Object that no conceivable logical wedge can be driven between intellect and Object. We want objective certainty! Husserl: Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben!

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God.

Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.

I grant that if God exists, then he necessarily exists. But this concession does not help. For one cannot infer from the divine modal status — necessarily existent if existent — that God exists. For God might be impossible. Necessarily existent if existent, but, contrapositively: impossibly existent if not existent. Anselm's Insight — that than which no greater can be conceived is either necessary or impossible — does not validate Anselm's Argument.

"But surely God is possible!"

How do you know that? There is no apodictic transition from conceivability by a finite mind to possibility in reality. Besides, you cannot mean by 'possible' 'merely possible,' possible but not actual. You must mean that God is possible in a sense of 'possible' that does not exclude actuality. But then your argument begs the question.

I am not maintaining that the ens necessarium (God) does not exist. I am maintaining that we have no insight into God's existence that allays all possible doubts. And so we are left with the seeming possibility of absolute nothingness, and the giddiness or (Heideggerian) Angst that it elicits in some of us.

If God almighty cannot ban the specter of absolute nothingness, or hold it at bay, can anything? Let's see.

The 'thought' that there might have been nothing at all is unthinkable. It is self-cancelling. Here is an argument:

The following are contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false. So much for truth value. What about modal status? Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true. If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.

Is it possible that (2) be true, that nothing exist? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Think about it, muchachos!

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist. This of course is not a proof of God, but of something rather less impressive, a state of affairs. The state of affairs, There is something, necessarily obtains. It cannot not obtain. And it cannot obtain necessarily without existing necessarily. Not a proof of God, but a starting point for a proof of God; in any case an important result: we seem to have achieved a knock-down proof of the necessary existence of something by sheer thinking. Thought makes certain contact with reality 'by its own power' without the mediation of the senses, or anything else for that matter, including divine revelation. Parmenides vindicatus est.

If this is right, then the thought of absolute nothingness is an unthinkable thought, hence no thought at all, a product of confusion, a 'ghost' to be dispelled by clear thinking. My ten-year-0ld self was perhaps 'spooked' by an unthinkable thought. Hence, the eldritch quality, the strangeness the old man cannot forget. It was perhaps only an emotional state induced by an attempt to overstep the bounds of intelligibility. Perhaps the boy succumbed to a purely subjective emotional state bare of cognitive content, bereft of intentionality, revelatory of nothing. Hence the giddy strangeness, a close cousin to Heidegger's Angst.

Up to this point Father Parmenides would agree.

But then what of the Humean reasoning? Does it not clamor for 'equal time'? An aporia threatens:

(H) Nothing is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

(P) Something is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

I don't know how to resolve this contradiction. I am of two minds. Parmenides and Hume are battling for hegemony in my shallow pate.

Can I conceive (think without internal logical contradiction) the nonexistence of what is the case, or a total way things are?

The Humean-Heideggerian part of my mind says Yes: you are thinking the thought of radical contingency. Everything is contingent including there being anything at all. There really might have been nothing at all. And this real possibility is a live one, moment to moment. There is no ultimate metaphysical support anywhere. That there is anything at all is a brute fact, a fact without cause or explanation, and thus a fact wholly unintelligible, hence ab-surd, We are hanging in the Void. Ich habe Angst vor dem Nichts! Heidegger's Angst and Sartre's nausea are revelatory emotions: they reveal, respectively, the ultimate nothingness at the base of all that exists, and the ultimate absurdity or unintelligibility of the existing of what exists.

The Parmenidean part of my mind says No: Thought and Being are 'the same.' You have grasped by sheer thought alone the absolute necessity of there being a way things are, an ultimate context. And so you were indeed 'spooked' as a boy when it seemed you looked into the abyss of utter nothingness and contextlessness.

The Riddle of the Self

Jacques comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Anselmian Antilogism

Philosophy is its problems, and they are best represented as aporetic polyads. One sort of aporetic polyad is the antilogism. An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true. The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible. If they are more than plausible, if they are self-evident or undeniable, then we are in the presence of an aporia in the strict sense. (From the Greek a-poros, no way.) Aporiai are intellectual impasses, or, to change the metaphor, intellectual knots that we cannot untie. Here is a candidate:

1. God is a perfect being.

2. A perfect being is one that exists necessarily if it exists at all.

3. Whatever exists exists contingently.

It is easy to see that the members of this trio are collectively inconsistent. So the trio is an antilogism. Now corresponding to every antilogism there are three valid syllogisms. (A syllogism is deductive argument having exactly two premises.) Thus one can argue validly from any two of the propositions to the negation of the remaining one. Thus there are three ways of solving the antilogism:

A. Reject (1). The price of rejection is high since (1) merely unpacks the meaning of 'God' if we think of God along Anselmian lines as "that than which no greater can be conceived," or as the greatest conceivable being. It seems intuitively clearly that an imperfect being could not have divine status. In particular, nothing imperfect could be an appropriate object of worship. To worship an imperfect being would be idolatry.

B. Reject (2). The price of rejection is steep here too since (2) seems merely to unpack the meaning of 'perfect being.' Intuitively, contingent existence is an imperfection.

C. Reject (3). This is a more palatable option, and many will solve the antilogism in this way. If ~(3), then there are noncontingent beings. A noncontingent being is either necessary or impossible. So if God is noncontingent, it does not follow that God is necessary. He could be impossible.

Unfortunately, the rejection of (3) is not without its problems.

The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption. One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence.

The price of rejecting (3) is that one must deny that conceivability entails possibility.

Is our antilogism an aporia in the strict sense? I don't know.

More on the Supposed Non-Existence of the Self

Peter Lupu e-mails:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

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

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

A Tension in My Thinking: Hume Meets Parmenides

I recently wrote the following (emphasis added):

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God. Now God, to be divine, must be a necessary being, indeed a necessary concretum. (God cannot be an abstract entity.) Therefore, even a necessary being such as God is conceivable or thinkable as nonexistent.

Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.

Note the ambiguity of 'conceivable.' It could mean thinkable, or it could mean thinkable without (internal) logical contradiction. Round squares are conceivable in the first sense but not in the second. If round squares were in no sense conceivable, how could we think about them and pronounce them broadly logically impossible? Think about it!

Now try the experiment with an abstract necessary being such as the number 7 or the proposition *7 is prime.* Nominalists have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of such Platonica, and surely we who are not nominalists can understand their point of view. In short, absolutely everything can be thought of, without logical contradiction, as not existing.

Humius vindicatus est.

But doesn't the bolded sentence contradict what I said in earlier posts about the impossibility of there being nothing at all, that there must be something or other, and that this can be known a priori by pure thought?

On the one hand, I tend to think that I can attain positive rational insight into the necessity of there being something or other, and thus the impossibility of there being nothing at all. On the other hand, I tend to think that everything is conceivably nonexistent, which implies that no such positive rational insight is possible.

Consider the following reasoning.

It is actually the case that something exists. The question is whether there might have been nothing at all. If the answer is in the negative, then it is necessarily the case that something exists. But don't confuse the following two propositions:

Necessarily (Something exists)

Something (necessarily exists).

The first says that every possible world is such that there is something or other in it; the second says that some one thing is such that it exists in every possible world. The second entails the first, but the first does not entail the second. I need only show that the first proposition is true, though I may end up showing that the second is true as well.

Moreover, I am concerned to show that we can attain positive rational insight into the first proposition's truth by sheer thinking. But now it appears that the tension in my thinking is a bare-faced contradiction. For the following cannot both be true:

(H) Everything is conceivably nonexistent.
(P) There is something the nonexistence of which is inconceivable.

And what is that thing whose nonexistence is inconceivable? What is the case. For if something exists, then that is the case. And if nothing exists, then that is the case. Either way, there is what is the case. Either way, there is the way things are. The way things are is not nothing, but something: a definite state of affairs.

The thought that there might have been nothing at all is the thought that it might have been the case that there is nothing at all. But if that had been the case, then something would have existed, namely, what is the case. Therefore, the thought that there might have been nothing at all refutes itself. By sheer thinking I can know something about reality, namely, that necessarily something exists. By pure thought I can arrive at a certain conclusion about real existence.

The argument can be couched in terms of possible worlds. A merely possible world is a total way things might have been. There cannot be a possible world in which nothing exists, for a possible world is not nothing, but something. Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition. Could there be a maximal proposition that entails that nothing exists? No, for that very proposition is something that exists.

So there has to be at least one thing, the proposition that nothing exists. And it has to be that that proposition is necessarily false, in which case its negation is necessarily true. So it is necessarily true that something exists.

Or one can argue as follows.

We have the concept true proposition. This concept is either instantiated, or it is not. If it is not instantiated, then it is true that it is not instantiated, which implies that the concept true proposition is instantiated. If, on the other hand, the concept in question is instantiated, then of course it is instantiated. Therefore, necessarily, the concept true proposition is instantiated, and there necessarily exists at least one truth, namely, the truth that the concept true proposition is
instantiated.

This is a sound ontological argument for the existence of at least one truth using only the concept true proposition, the law of excluded middle, and the unproblematic principle that, for any proposition p, p entails that p is true. By 'proposition' here I simply mean whatever can be appropriately characterized as either true or false. That there are propositions in this innocuous sense cannot be reasonably denied.

So here too we have a seemingly knock-down proof of the necessary existence of something by sheer thinking. Thought makes contact with reality 'by its own power' without the mediation of the senses. (For future rumination: Does this refute the Thomist principle that nothing is in the intelect that is not first in the senses?)

Parmenides vindicatus est.

The apparent contradiction is this:

(H) Nothing is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

(P) Something is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

I don't know how to resolve this. I am of two minds. Parmenides and Hume are battling for hegemony in my shallow pate.

Can I conceive (think without internal logical contradiction) the nonexistence of what is the case, or the way things are? The Humean part of my mind says Yes: you are conceiving an absolute Other to discursive thought, a realm in which the laws of logic do not hold. You are conceiving the Transdiscursive!

The Parmenidean part of my mind says No: there is no Transdiscursive; Thought and Being are 'the same.'

The Sense of Contingency and the Sense of Absurdity

The parallel is fascinating and worth exploring.

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God. Now God, to be divine, must be a necessary being, indeed a necessary concretum. (God cannot be an abstract entity.) Therefore, even a necessary being such as God is conceivable or thinkable as nonexistent.

Note the ambiguity of 'conceivable.' It could mean thinkable, or it could mean thinkable without (internal) logical contradiction. Round squares are conceivable in the first sense but not in the second. If round squares were in no sense conceivable, how could we think about them and pronounce them broadly logically impossible? Think about it!

Now try the experiment with an abstract necessary being such as the number 7 or the proposition *7 is prime.* Nominalists have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of such Platonica, and surely we who are not nominalists can understand their point of view. In short, absolutely everything can be thought of, without logical contradiction, as not existing.

Humius vindicatus est.

I now define the sense of contingency as the sense that everything is thinkable without logical contradiction as nonexistent. I claim that this sense is essential to the type of mind we have. I also claim that the sense of contingency does not entail that everything is modally contingent, i.e., existent in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds. So from the mere fact that I can think the nonexistence of God without logical contradiction, it does not follow that God is a contingent being. I further claim that we have a hard-to-resist tendency to conflate illicitly the sense of contingency (precisely as I have just defined it) with genuine modal contingency.

So, if someone argues a contingentia mundi to God as causa prima, he can expect the knee-jerk response: what caused God? Behind that reflexive question is the sense of contingency: if the universe is contingent (because conceivably nonexistent) and needs a cause, then so is anything posited as first cause. What then caused the First Cause? If nothing caused it, the knee-jerk responder continues, then it just exists as a matter of brute fact; and if we can accept brute-factuality at the level of the First Cause, then we can accept it at the level of the universe and be done with this nonsense. We can say, with Russell, that the universe just exists and that's all.

My point is that it is the sense of contingency, together with the illicit conflation just mentioned, that fuels the knee-jerk response to the argument to a causa prima.

The sense of absurdity as described by Thomas Nagel is analogous to the sense of contingency, or so I claim. The sense that our lives are Nagel-absurd does not entail that they are objectively absurd. And yet we are necessarily such that we cannot avoid the sense of Nagel-absurdity. About absolutely everything we can ask: what is the purpose of it? What is it good for? What is the point of it? The subjectively serious, under the aspect of eternity, viewed wth detachment from nowhere, comes to appear objectively gratuitous. This holds for every context of meaning, no matter how wide, including the ultimate context. Suppose the ultimate context is eternal fellowship with God. Reflecting on it from our present perspective, viewing it from outside, we can ask what the point of it would be, just as we can ask what caused God.

The classical answer to 'What caused God?' is that God is a necessary being. He has no external cause or explanation, but his existence is not a brute fact either. God is self-existent or self-grounding or self-explanatory. Nagel has trouble with this idea: "But it's very hard to understand how there could be such a thing." (WDIAM, 99) Why does our man have trouble? Because there is nothing that could put a stop to our explanation-seeking 'Why?' questions. In a sense he is right. The structure of our finite discursive intellects makes it impossible to stop definitively, makes it impossible to have self-evident, question-squelching, positive insight into the absolute metaphysical necessity of God's existence in the way have self-evident positive insight into the impossibility of round squares or the necessity of colors being extended. The best we can do is see the failure of entailment from 'Everything is conceivably nonexistent' to 'Everything is modally contingent.'

Just as Nagel cannot suppress the question 'What explains God?,' he cannot suppress the question 'What is the point of God?' or 'What is the point of fulfilling God's purpose for our lives?' Nagel cannot see how there could be something that gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but has no external point itself. He cannot see how God can be self-purposing, i.e., without external purpose but also not purposeless. Nagel thinks that if the point of our lives is supplied by a pointless God, and a pointless God is acceptable, then we ought to find pointless lives acceptable.

Nagel can't see how the ultimate point could be God or eternal life with God. "Something whose point cannot be questioned from outside because there is no outside?" (100) Given the very structure of our embodied awareness, there is always the possibility of the 'outside view' which then collides with the situated subjective 'inside view.' It is this unavoidable duality within finite embodied consciousness, and essential to it, that makes it impossible for Nagel to accept a self-purposing, self-significant, self-intelligible ultimate context.

So for Nagel objective meaninglessness is the last word. For me it is not: our lives are ultimately and objectively meaningful. But Nagel has a point: we cannot, given the present configuration of finite, discursive, embodied awareness, truly understand with positive insight God's metaphysical necessity or how there could be an ultimate context of existential meaning that is self-grounding axiologically, teleologically, and ontologically.

So I suggest that ultimate felicity and ultimate meaningfulness can be had only by a transfiguration and transformation of our 'present' type of finite, discursive consciousness with its built-in duality of the subjective and the objective.

But I can only gesture in the direction of that Transfiguration. I cannot present it to you while we inhabit the discursive plane. All I can do is point to the Transdiscursive, and motivate the pointing by exfoliating the antinomies and aporiai that remain insoluble this side of the Great Divide.

________________________

*One way to oppose this is via the Anderson-Welty argument lately examined. If the exsistence of God is the ultimate presupposition of the laws of logic, then all reasoning, whether valid or invalid, to God or away from God or neither, and all considerations anent logical possibility, necessity, impossibility, contradiction and the like presuppose the existence of God.

A second way of opposition was tread by me in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

Second Thoughts: A Philosophy Blog

Readers who have stuck with me over the years will remember commenter 'Spur' whose comments were the best I received at the old Powerblogs site. Safely ensconced in an academic position, he now enters the blogosphere under his real name, Stephen Puryear. His weblog is entitled Second Thoughts.

I recently reposted from the old blog Hume's Fork and Leibniz's Fork which is in part a response to 'Spur.' His counter-response is here.

Hume’s Fork and Leibniz’s Fork

No doubt you have heard of Hume's Fork. 'Fork,' presumably from the Latin furca, suggests a bifurcation, a division; in this case of meaningful statements into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes, the one consisting of relations of ideas, the other of matters of fact. In the Enquiry, Hume writes:

     Propositions of this kind [relations of ideas] can be discovered
     purely by thinking, with no need to attend to anything that
     actually exists anywhere in the universe. . . . Matters of fact . .
     . are not established in the same way; and we cannot have such
     strong grounds for thinking them true. The contrary of every matter
     of fact is still possible, because it doesn't imply a contradiction
     and is conceived by the mind as easily and clearly as if it
     conformed perfectly to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow
     is just as intelligible as – and no more contradictory than – the
     proposition that the sun will rise tomorrow.

One question that arises is whether Hume's Fork was anticipated by any earlier philosopher. Leibniz of course makes a distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact that is very similar to Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact. See, for example, Monadology #33. In a very astute comment from the old blog, 'Spur' details the similarities and concludes:

     Leibniz and Hume have the same basic distinction in mind, between
     those truths which are necessary and can be known a priori, and
     those which are contingent and can only be known a posteriori. The
     two philosophers use slightly different terminology, and Leibniz
     would balk at Hume's use of 'relations between ideas' in connection
     with truths of reason only, but the basic distinction seems to me
     to be the same.

I deny that the basic distinction is the same and I base my denial on a fact that Spur will admit, namely, that for Leibniz, every proposition is analytic in that every (true) proposition is such that the predicate is contained in the subject: Praedicatum inesse subjecto verae propositionis. I argue as follows. Since for Leibniz every truth is analytic, while for Hume some truths are analytic and some are not, the two distinctions cannot be the same. To this, the Spurian (I do not say Spurious) response is:

     The [Leibnizian] distinction is between two kinds of analytic
     truths: those that can be finitely analyzed, and those that can't.
     This is an absolute distinction and there are no truths that belong
     to both classes. Even from God's point of view there is presumably
     an absolute distinction between necessary and contingent truths,
     though perhaps he wouldn't view this as a distinction between
     finitely and non-finitely analyzable truths, because his knowledge
     of truths is intuitive and never involves analysis.

I grant that the two kinds of Leibnizian analytic truths form mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes. But I deny that this suffices to show that "the same basic distinction" is to be found in both Leibniz and Hume.

One consideration is that they do not form the same mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes. Though every Humean relation of ideas is a Leibnizian truth of reason, the converse does not hold. I think Spur will agree to this. But if he does, then surely this shows that the two distinctions are not the same. I should think that extensional sameness is necessary, though not sufficient, for sameness.

But even if the two distinctions were extensionally the same, they are not 'intensionally' the same distinction.

Consider Judas is Judas and Judas betrays Christ. For both philosophers, the first proposition is necessary and the second is contingent. But Leibniz and Hume cannot mean the same by 'contingent.' If you negate the first, the result is a contradiction, and both philosophers would agree that it is, and that it doesn't matter whether the proposition is viewed from a divine or a human point of view. The negation of the second, however, is, from God's point of view a contradiction for Leibniz, but not for Hume. For Leibniz, the betrayal of Christ is included within the complete individual concept of Judas that God has before his mind. So if God entertains the proposition Judas does not betray Christ, he sees immediately that it is self-contradictory in the same way that I see immediately that The meanest man in Fargo, North Dakota is not mean is self-contradictory.

Of course, for Leibniz, it is contingent that Judas exists: there are possible worlds in which Judas does not exist. But given that Judas does exist, he has all his properties essentially. Thus Judas betrays Christ is contingent only in an epistemic sense: we finite intellects see no contradiction when we entertain the negation of the proposition in question. Given our finitude, our concepts of individuals cannot be complete: they cannot include every property, monadic and relational, of individuals. But if, per impossibile, we could ascend to the divine standpoint, and if every truth is analytic (as Leibniz in effect holds via his predicate-in-subject principle), then we would see that Judas betrays Christ is conditionally necessary: nec
essary given the existence of Judas.

'Contingent' therefore means different things for Leibniz and Hume. Contingency in Hume cuts deeper. Not only is the existence of Judas contingent, it is also contingent that he has the properties he has. This is a contingency rooted in reality and not merely in our ignorance.

Perhaps my point could be put as follows. The Leibnizian distinction is not absolute in the sense that, relative to the absolute point of view, God's point of view, the distinction collapses. For God, both of the Judas propositions cited above are analytic, both are necessarily true (given the existence of Judas), and both are knowable a priori. But for Hume, the distinction is absolute in that there is no point of view relative to which the distinction collapses.

I'm stretching now, but I think one could say that, even if Hume admitted God into his system, he would say that not even for God is a matter of fact knowable a priori. For the empiricist Hume the world is radically contingent in a way it could not be for Leibniz the rationalist.

What Is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?

One source of its appeal is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. Permit me to explain. (My ruminations are in part inspired by Ernest Gellner, to give credit where credit is due.)

Crudely put, as befits a crude philosophy, logical positivism is just Hume warmed over. The LPs take his famous two-pronged fork and sharpen the tines. Hume spoke of relations of ideas and matters of fact, and consigned to the flames anything thing that was not one or the other. In the Treatise of Human Nature, he spoke of "school metaphysics and divinity" as deserving of such rude treatment. Since Hume's day, old-time metaphysics and theology have had a forking hard time of it.

The LPs spoke of two disjoint classes of statements and maintained that every cognitively meaningful statement must be a member of the one or the other. The one class contains the truths of logic and mathematics and such analytic statements as 'Every cygnet is a swan' all interpreted as true by convention. The other class consists of statements empirically verifiable in principle. Any statement not in one of these two disjoint classes is adjudged by the LPs to be cognitive meaningless. Thus the aesthetic statement, 'The adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth exceeds in beauty anything Bruckner wrote' is by their lights not false, but cognitively meaningless, though they generously grant it some purely subjective emotive meaning. And the same goes for the characteristic statements one finds in theology, metaphysics, and ethics. Such statements are not false, but meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false.

Imagine a debate between a Muslim and a Christian. Muslim: "God is one! There is no god but God (Allah)!" Christian: "God is triune (three-in-one)." For an LP, the debate is meaningless since theological assertion and counter-assertion are meaningless. The assertions are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. Or consider a debate between two Christians. They are both Trinitarians: there is one God in three divine Persons. But the man from Rome maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque) while the man from Constantinople maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds directly from the Father. For an LP, this debate about the procession of Persons is cognitively meaningless. I chose these examples to show how attractive LP is. For many of you will be inclined to think of these debates as in some sense meaningless. "How could one know one way or the other?" Many of you will be inclined to want to tie meaningfulness to empirical verifiability. Nevertheless, Logical Positivism is untenable. But that is not my present point.

My present point concerns the appeal of OLP. The OL boys weren't out to resurrect metaphysics. They took on board the anti-metaphysical animus of the LPs. But their approach allowed the salvaging of ways of talking that the LPs had no interest in preserving. Religious language is a key example. So what I am contending is that one source of the appeal of OL philosophy was that it allowed religious talk and thus religion itself to be saved from the forking accusation of meaninglessness. But it did this without crediting old-time metaphysics. You can see why that would appeal to a lot of people. To explain this properly would take a lot of scribbling.

But the central idea is that religion is a form of life and a language game, a self-contained language game that needs no justification ab extra. Hence it needs no justification from metaphysics or philosophy generally. It is in order as it is — to use a characteristically Wittgensteinian turn of phrase. By the same token, religion cannot be attacked from the side of philosophy. It is an island of meaning unto itself, and is insofar forth insulated from criticism. (L. insula, ae = island.) Nor can it come into conflict with science or be debunked by science. Within the religious language game there are valid and invalid moves, things it is correct and incorrect to say; but the langauge game itself is neither correct nor incorrect. It just is. Religion is a groundless system of belief, a system of belief that neither needs nor is capable of justification. Since I reject both LP and OLP, I am not endorsing this view of religion. I am merely explaining one of the reasons why people are attracted to OLP: it allows them to practice a religion while ignoring both the threat from traditional philosophy (which demands the justification of key religious tenets) and the the threat of positivism which makes positive science the ultimate arbiter of reality.

This post truncates a larger discussion to be found in What is Right and What is Wrong in Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion.

Hume on Belief and Existence

Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment cannot consist in the combining of distinct concepts.

Continue reading “Hume on Belief and Existence”