File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 177


Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 21:11:42 +0200 (EET)
From: j laari <jlaari-AT-cc.jyu.fi>
Subject: M-TH: Re: about Hugh vs Justin


OK, 

Justin told that he got enough of this discussion. Fine with me. Yet
I'll send this post - I did spent some time with that before I
received Justin's recent posts, and in addition, Hugh wanted to know
why I don't think transcendental phil. just a useless petit bourgeois
fantasy.

Justin wrote:

> I don't get. First, "something like perceived" isn't
> exactly the same as "perceived", so what do you mean?

"I mean known directly without inference, the way we know that
something red is red when we see it."

Again a new concept, inference. I got to ruminate that..

> Secondly, If 'perception' means the act by which we
> gain information from 'external world' then how we can
> apply the concept of perception to 'inner experiences'
> (because we don't gain information about our thinking
> through our senses but directly, by introspection, or
> by 'intuition' perhaps)?

"If you define it that way, or define it as knowledge gained by the
senses, then you can't, in the ordinary run of things, perceive your
thoughts. What you can do is know them without inference and (...)
with less worry about whether what you know is accurate, because in
the ordinary course of things thinking you think something effectively
guarantees that you do think it."

Yeah, or as you yourself said:

> Maybe your thought is that it's different to have a thought
> than to know I have a thought. But I am aware taht I have
> a thought, I have that much self-consciousness about my
> inner state, what's the problemw ith saying that I know
> I have it, if I do have it?
>
> Normally that sort of belief is self-verifying.

Self-verifying. Yes, perhaps we can say so, or self-evident: when I
have one particular thought in my mind it's self-evident that I have
it. It doesn't need other proofs. However, it's evident for me only.
There's a difference to knowledge that (a) concerns 'external' state
of things, and (b) is propositionally claimed, and as such (c) can be
judged and 'falsified' (I guess you prefer more this formulation)
socially. That's why I'm insisting on differences between concepts of
knowledge and awareness (& other cognitive concepts).


"Well, you must have a deeper understanding or a much shallower one. I
think they're very odd."

It's not about "depth" or lack of it. I'm well aware that I'm no
"Kant-scholar" or philosopher of any inclination, for that matter, and
never will be. The point for me is whether an argument similar to
Kant's transcendental one makes any sense. In my opinion it does. It's
possible to clarify that and how social or cultural 'rules' (whatever)
are internalised and then used as guiding lines in reconstruction of
sense-data into 'objects' (phenomena), for example. One point is to
make sense of that from the viewpoint of self-consciousness. I don't
much care whether the status of such 'rules' is called 'unconscious'
or 'transcendental', what matters is that we don't pay attention to
the use of them in our daily life. All our time would be spent on such
reflection if we'd decide to be "more self-conscious" than we usually
are in relation to these 'rules' and such.

OK, they are odd when Kant's concept of transcendental is accepted.
You think that 'transcendental' necessarily implies apriorism, I
recall. It wasn't so in medieval logic with 'transcendentalia' (basic
or ultimate concepts), and also neo-kantians have been reluctant to
accept the a priori status of transcendental concepts. For some weird
historical reason Kant felt he had to suppose it to be necessary to
think of them as a priori. We don't (we can't, in a matter of fact)
accept his conviction. Yet that doesn't make it unworthy to take a
look at his transcendentalism.

Your point of view is that of laboratory science and what philosophy
can offer to it. You don't even seem to be paying attention to
considerations of linguistic phil. (also, or better, mainly made by
U.S. analytical philosophers) as a contribution to phil. of mind.
Perhaps because it cannot, at least today, be turned into laboratory
experiments. In my opinion it doesn't lessen its (possibly genuine)
philosophical value. On the other hand, in "philosophies of
consciousness" and in "Subjektphilosophie" the same questions have
been wondered with phil. of mind (which seems to be quite close to
phil. of consciousness). The difference is that for them, esp. for
phil. of subject, the point is not so much their utility for
laboratory experiments but the crucial role in systematic
philosophical and theoretical thinking in general (or as they earlier
said, in "Phil. System"): how and for what reasons (individual)
thinking does develope? how does it relate to social processes? into
what peculiarities the clash of biological organism (with brain and
central nervous system and such) and social world does lead? "How, and
why, it is that there is world at all [to subject, or to subjective
experience]?" as they tend to ask.


> You're splitting the mind into two: empirical and
> transcendental? And empirical mind is subjective,
> transcendental objective? Haven't found such a
> formulation in Kant so far.

"He doesn't put it that way. But he does distinguish between the
empirical self, the locus of thoughts, and the transcendental unity of
apperception, the locus, apparently, of the tr conditions of
experience, the I which has all of my experiences. I am deeply
mystified about what sense of "mental" that might be."

I think I understand you. Perhaps I should have used the term
"psychic"? (I don't believe it would have helped; I tried that last
autumn.) Unfortunately you haven't clarified much your concepts of
mental and mind so far. - By the way, why to ask the *locus* of trans.
unity of apperception? Why not to think of it as *function*? I mean,
there it is, among other psychic or mental functions, and the point is
rather to conceptualize them and their relations than to map their
locations, as if we could today draw a brain map and say, "here are
these and there are those". I'd let tomorrow's psychologists to do
that (if it'll ever possible, I believe that one day it somehow will
be). Besides, they can't do empirical research without concepts and
learned guesses (hypotheses, as they're called), so I tend to believe
that philosophers' efforts will be appreciated.


> Seems like you're somehow restricting mind to
> thoughts, as if they were co-extensive? Or rather:
> you're restricting mind into our everyday awareness
> and experience of our own mental activity.

"I'm saying that's a sense of mind I understand."

OK, understood.

> Thereby you're forced to claim that trans.cat's
> aren't "in the same place" (so to speak) with rest
> of mental. Yet they are "here and now" all the time.

"Yes, it's vey puzzling. I do think taht K thinks they are in some
sense in the same place, in the same way taht empirical objects and
Things in Themselves are in the same "place" and are in fact the
"same" things. How that can be is hard to understand."

Aren't "Things in Themselves" "out there"? But Kant's 'objects' as
'phenomena' are the ones that are "in our heads", in our minds ("here
and now"), "processed" by trans.cat's and forms of perception in
trans. apperception from raw data provided by our senses? That is,
"Things in Themselves" as "Things for Us" (as perceived).

Now, trans.cat's are (must be?) in the same place with rest of the
mental/psychic functions: but not necessarily "in" the consciousness,
not necessarily conscious functions. The question I'm after concerns
the "levels of generality": what is the total brain process ("All that
goes on in brain") as seen, say, introspectively (should we call it
'mind', 'psyche', 'subjectivity' or what?), and its different
functions, some of them being easier and others harder to grasp
introspectively? How we should name them? In my opinion it's no good
to collapse 'thinking', 'mind', 'knowing' etc. together. Thinking as
conceptual operations is one thing and should be differentiated from
imagination, though the latter also may use language. There are lots
of clearly conscious operations, but also some less transparent
operations that could be called unconscious ones for the sake of
clarity, despite of dismerits and shortcomings of freudian theories.
In a same sense the totality of trans. operations Kant calls trans.
unity of apperception (whatever name we will give it) should be
conceptualised as a differentiated cluster of functions within "the
total process".

Why I insist on that? Simply because there's something special to
human beings, something that makes all the difference: we are not only
self-conscious beings that are able to comprehend and make sense of
own activity. We can also discuss it. One point with sciences and
philosophy is to make understandable our peculiarity. Within natural
scientific framework that cannot be wholly done (and without it that
cannot be done), because this self-conscious nature of humanity,
combined with our ability to learn and adjust self-consciously our
activity according to new knowledge, cannot be submitted to natural
explanation. There's something special with our sociality and social
world that's "more" than nature. Therefore we have to tackle with
these seemingly idealist and subjectivist conceptions that have been
concerned with socio-cultural issues before modern ideas of
human/social sciences evolved. (Foucault, If I remember it at all
anymore, analyzed in "Order of things" quite nicely the birth of "The
Man" as a precondition for human/social sciences to emerge; that is,
the slow enlightenment that led to realisation that though we human
beings as living organisms are part of nature and its laws we are also
self-conscious beings capable to freedom etc. Foucault of course
mocked such old-fashioned notions..)


> Kant wasn't able to give them precise theoretical status
> and genesis - otherwise we all would be kantians - but
> surely he thought that they are in mind but not of mind.
> They aren't dependent on our empirical minds, of course,
> except in a sense that there has to be a mind in order
> there to be transcendental categories...

"Hm. Means what? Mind in what sense? The tr unity of app expresses the
operation of the categories, K says something very like that. But they
aren't dependent on the empirical self; rather the reverse."

Right, not dependent on empirical self (say, our subjectivity), but
dependent on that the psychic apparatus or mind (whatever) does
develope at all. Or should we suppose that two days old baby does have
trans. apparatus? So: mind in the sense of totality of psychic
processes.


> About the objectivity of trans.cat's: Yes, Kant surely aimed at idea
> that they are objective, but he wasn't able to provide a theory for
> that. So strictly conceptually they remained subjective ones.

"They're objective in that we can't get away from them, we can't have
experience that evades the categories and isn't in time (and maybe
space)."

Yes, of course. But as I said, they aren't totally independent of our
special constitution: they aren't "out there" but "in here". In Kant
they are basically subjective because he couldn't provide them with
theory explaining their genesis (from Nature, from Society - it
doesn't matter; the point is that for Kant trans. functions were (a) a
priori (therefore not of social world), and (b) not a result of
development (therefore somehow like some innate ideas yet not based
for example on species type characteristica)).


"I think thinking is a matter of degree, Cognitive states are
conceptual. They require, but are not necesssarily reducible to,
language. But there can be sentience without cognition. The nonand
pre-linguistic have thoughts and experiences that they don't
conceptualize and can't express in language. Below that there is lower
level intentionality that's not even sentient, as a plant indicates
the presence of the sun or a thermostatic system the temperature."

OK. Understood.


> ... but also articulate them conceptually. But surely
> you aren't saying that this (in a loose sense) cognitive
> surplus is somehow part of the emotion?

"Absolutely. As Rousseau points out, it's a peculiarly human ability
to be able to have emotions about things that we could even grasp
without language, such as, the worry about gloabl warming leading to
ecodisaster or the concern that one's spouse will find out about one's
lover."

Hugh already commented on that. It's uclear to me: absolutely what?
You're absolutely saying that 'cognitive surplus' is part of emotion?
Or absolutely not saying so? That's unclear to me. By the way, already
Spinoza made it clear there's a difference between an emotion or
feeling (affect) on one hand and awareness of it on the other. And
thirdly, there's the cause of it. Either more or less 'unconscious' or
based on something comprehended, even on knowledge, like anger because
of pollution.


"Therea rea lot of difficulties with the notion of the unconscious.
How can be have mental states at all of which we cannot be aware?"

We cannot have if we define mind and mental as conscious only. If we
think consciousness to be part of mind (as a group of different
functions or something like that) then it's different. Anyway, why all
of mind and all mental should be something we are aware of? Why the
supposition of "transparency"? It seems to me that Justin's concept of
mind is that of consciousness.


> And my concern are the questions: Is it really *knowledge* and
> *knowing* when we are *aware* of the contents of our minds?

"Why not? Maybe your thought is that it's different to havea thought
than to know I have a thought. But I am aware taht I have a thought, I
have that much self-consciousness about my inner state, what's the
problemw ith saying that I know I have it, if I do have it?"

Let's say: my insistence is on that awareness of some 'internal state'
is one thing and knowledge (that is propositional and concerns
something 'external') is another thing. And the problem is that
self-evidency of my awareness of my conscious states cannot be studied
empirically like the claim that pink elephant sits in the waiting-room
of railway station. So awareness of 'internal states' isn't empirical
in its usual sense.


> How it can be proved to be true?

"Normally that sort of belief is self-verifying. ASk more pertinently,
how can it be proved _false_? "

OK, let's be scientific in a popperian manner, let's try to falsify
it.


"Here's an example. Say I think I love my work. But it's pointed out
tome that I shirk, come in late, leave early, spend all my time at
work reading the mail and playing computer games, etc. It can be
reasonbaly inferred taht my belief about my love for my work is
false."

Hmm, we can also ask the different concepts of work and labour here.
The I of your example may think that wage labour is lovable only when
it's possible to cheat the firm and the bosses as much as possible.
Then the boss tells about the "official" interpretation of work,
refers to contract etc.

However my question concerned basically such 'internal states' that
cannot be falsified or verified by others: that I have in my mind the
idea of green humanoids from Mars cannot be studied empirically by
neuroscientists or psychologists. They have to rely on my word.


> See, our *knowledge* concerning some state of things
> in reality and our *awareness* of our own states of
> mind aren't exactly of same nature - or are they?
> According to your conception they are?

"Well, make out the difference for me."

I think I've tried to make it couple of times already. But what about
that: knowledge concerns some objective state of things, it's
propositional, it's true or false, and can be "transmitted" to others
(for evaluation of its truth-value); awareness instead concerns
'internal states' of a person that by definition (I guess) cannot be
evaluated by others. They can evaluate only the stories told by that
person. I think there's a drastic difference.

It's the form or contours of trans.phil. that I find interesting.
Human and social sciences rely quite a lot on it. No wonder because
they developed at the time when neo-kantianism was the academic doxa
(late 19th century and the turn of the century). Kant's original
project as a whole was surely dismissed but different sides of it were
made almost absolute guiding lines. "Values" were internalised, for
example, and then they organized people's activities. That also
affected theory of ideology: Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge
was first formulation of now fashionable "total ideology" (= whole
social world is ideological, because we cannot think neutrally, we
cannot be independent of values etc. - which is epitomized in the
weird concept of "false consciousness"). Today althusserian and
lacanian influenced theories continue that brand of thinking, along
standard sociologisms. Transcendentalism is worth of attention because
it works in a form or another in much of contemporary cultural,
political and social thinking. They merely repeat its gestures and
forms of argument - and shortcomings.

Jukka



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