a) Rejection of the Principle of Immanence

We shall now return to the source of the skeptical triumph over Cartesianism, namely, the principle of immanence. According to this principle, the mind knows only what is in it. It cannot reach out and make direct contact with perceptual objects. The Cartesians added a special twist to this traditional dogma by stressing the issue of certainty. To know, they insisted, is to know for certain; and the mind can only know for certain what is in it. These two themes reinforce each other. One may argue on independent grounds that certain knowledge is possible only of the contents of one’s mind. But if certain knowledge is the only kind of knowledge that deserves to be called knowledge, then the principle of immanence follows. On the other hand, one may argue, beginning at the other end, that since the principle of immanence holds, and since knowledge of one’s own mind is the only certain knowledge, that all true knowledge is certain knowledge. I believe that both of these principles are false.

Let me illustrate the Cartesian problem by means of a diagram. In figure I, the Cartesian mind is represented by a circle. Within the circle is an idea. This idea is known by the mind in some way. That it is known by the mind is represented by the arrow that aims at the idea. The question is: How does the mind know the external perceptual object? That the perceptual object can be known only indirectly follows from the principle of immanence. But in what this indirect knowledge consists is the puzzle the Cartesian cannot solve.

Figure 1

And this is not the only problem with the Cartesian view. As we mentioned earlier, the nature of the small arrow within the mind is not explained. But we shall leave all of the other problems aside and concentrate on the skeptical argument. The skeptic asks, as we remember, how we can possibly know what object is presented by which idea. And he goes on to claim that the Cartesian cannot answer this question, because he cannot compare a given idea with its object. He cannot compare the idea I with the object O because such a comparison requires that we know directly not only I, but also O. But the principle of immanence, accepted by the Cartesian, does not allow for direct knowledge of O.

What is our analysis of the situation? In order to concentrate only on the important points, I shall simplify to the point of distortion. Assume that someone sees a certain perceptual object O. According to our account, this person experiences a certain mental act of seeing. This act has a certain content, and the content stands in the intentional nexus to O. Figure 2 gives the gist of this situation.

Figure 2

The small crosses represent the mental acts of experiencing and of seeing. The contents of these acts are not diagrammed. The arrow depicts the intentional nexus. The circle represents not a mind, as in our previous diagram, but what I shall call a “conscious state.” By a conscious state I mean the sum total of what a mind experiences at a given moment. It is the (complex) object of the act of experiencing. At a given moment, a mind experiences not only a mental act of seeing, but also various sensations, feelings, emotions, images, etc. In order to keep the diagram as simple as possible, I have left out all of these things and put only the mental act of seeing into the conscious state.

A mind is not identical with a conscious state, for it also consists of the act of experiencing. Thus a mind at a moment has two essential parts. It always consists of an experience and what is experienced. It always consists of an act of experiencing and of a conscious state.

There is some similarity between our mind and the Cartesian mind, even though the diagrams look quite different. This similarity appears if we imagine, for just a moment, another circle drawn around both the act of experiencing and the conscious state, as in figure 3.

Figure 3

What corresponds to the mysterious arrow in the Cartesian mind is our act of experiencing. Instead of an idea in the mind, we have the mental act of seeing or, more precisely, the content of this act. And finally and most importantly, the puzzling relationship between the idea and its object is explicated by the intentional nexus between the content of the act of seeing, on the one hand, and the perceptual object, on the other.

What happens when we try to apply the skeptical argument to our analysis? The crucial question becomes: How do we know what perceptual object corresponds to which content? Well, we know what perceptual object we are seeing when the mind is in the state depicted by figure 2, say, an elephant. But we do not know what kind of content we are experiencing in this situation. In order to find out what kind of content it is, what it “feels like” to see an elephant rather than something else, we must turn our attention away from the elephant and concentrate on the act of seeing and its content. This switch in attention results in a different mental state from the one of figure 2. It requires, I submit, that we experience not an act of seeing, but rather an act which intends the act of seeing. It requires that we experience an act of reflection whose object is the act of seeing, as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4

This then is our answer to the skeptic. We know what perceptual object corresponds to which content by, firstly, seeing the perceptual object, as shown in figure 2, and, secondly, by inspecting the content of the act of seeing, as shown in figure 4. In this fashion, we can compare the one with the other.

Notice how radically the dialectic of the situation has shifted. For the Cartesian, the problem is how he can know the perceptual object. For us, it is how we can know the content. To see an object, according to our view, is to know it in the sense of being acquainted with it. And to see an object is to experience a mental act of seeing. There is no problem of how we know the object which we see. To know a perceptual object is, not to know the content of the act of seeing, but to experience this content. Experience is not knowledge. Quite to the contrary: What is experienced is, ipso facto, not known. In order to know the content, one must shift one’s attention away from the elephant to the content. And this is achieved by reflection on one’s act of seeing. Nothing is easier than to know what one is seeing. What is difficult is to find out what the contents of one’s mind are. The Cartesian has exactly the opposite problem. He presumably knows what is in his mind, but does not know what is before it. He assumes that to know something is to experience it. And the skeptic then argues that since one cannot experience perceptual objects, one cannot know them. But the skeptic cannot attack our view. We do not accept the principle of immanence. Quite to the contrary: We hold that the mind never knows what is in it. The mind can only know what is before it. More precisely, the mind only knows the objects of those acts which are part of the conscious state. Perhaps Hegel makes the same point in paragraphs 84 and 85 of the Introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit:

For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not. The object, it is true, seems only to be for consciousness in the way that consciousness knows it; it seems that consciousness cannot, as it were, get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object is in itself and hence, too, cannot test its own knowledge by that standard. But the distinction between the in-itself and knowledge is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is for it the in-itself; and knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is, for it, another moment. Upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination rests.

(G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 54)

The Cartesian has a different concept of knowledge from ours. According to him, knowledge resides in experience. According to our view, knowledge resides in the mental acts which are experienced. Experience, we hold, is blind. Only the mental acts which are experienced can know.

Let us add an illustration in order to drive this point home. When you desire something, you “know” not your desire, but the object of your desire, for your desire is merely experienced; it is merely in your mind. In order to inspect your desire, you must not experience it, but must experience instead an act of reflection whose object it is. Similarly, to fear something is to “know” what you fear, but not to “know” your fear. In order to inspect your fear, you must experience an act of reflecting on the fear. And similarly for other mental acts.

b) Another Look at the Argument from the
Relativity of Sensing

Having reversed the Cartesian turn, we shall take another look at the argument from the relativity of sensing. In Russell’s version of the argument, the true color of a certain table is in doubt. Russell asserts that if you look at the table from different angles, you will see different colors. And he concludes that the table in itself has no particular color, since there is no reason why we should ascribe one rather than any other of those colors to the table.

We have seen why and where Russell’s argument fails. But we can now take a more informed look at the relevant mental states. When you look at the table from a certain point of view, you experience a certain colored sensation, S₁, and you see that the table is light brown, as in figure 5.

Figure 5

We shall assume that the sensation is not light brown, but yellow. Next, you walk around the table and look at it from a different angle, so that you experience a sense-impression which is not yellow, but grey, as in figure 6.

Figure 6

Notice that even though the color of your visual sensation has changed, what you see (as you see it) has not changed: You still see that the table is light brown. Thus what is true is not, as Russell assumes, that you see different colors from different angles, but rather that you experience different colors from different angles. Russell further assumes, and thus opens the door to the skeptic, that you know the different colors which you (allegedly) see, but have no reason to attribute a particular one to the table as such. From our analysis it follows that you do not “know” these colors, for these colors are colors of your sensations and therefore experienced but not known. What you know in this situation is the table and its color: you know that the table is light brown because you see it to be light brown. In order to know the sensations and their colors, you have to inspect them. But you can only inspect them if you turn your attention away from the table and pay attention to the sensations instead. You must reflect on the sensation rather than merely experience it, as shown in figure 7.

Figure 7

When you see that the table is light brown, you experience a yellow sensation. But you do not know that your sensation is yellow. To realize that the sensation is yellow, to notice its color, to become aware of its color, you must attend to the sensation rather than to the table. You must stop seeing the color of the table and inspect your visual sensation. You must turn inward, so to speak, and reflect on your sensation. There is no problem of how we know the color of the table: we simply see what color it has. If anything is difficult, it is to discover the features of our sensations. Their inspection requires a special mental attitude, a mental attitude which is difficult to induce and even more difficult to maintain. These are of course psychological difficulties, not philosophical problems. As far as the argument from the relativity of sensing is concerned, we have no philosophical problem. We know the colors of perceptual objects by perception, and we know the colors of our visual sensations by inspection. Neither is known only indirectly, that is, by inference. But they are known by different kinds of mental acts. We see the colors of perceptual objects, but we cannot see the colors of our sensation. On the other hand, we can reflect on the colors of our sensations, but we cannot reflect on the colors of perceptual objects.

c) Reid and the Nature of Attention

Our distinction between experience and reflection was anticipated by earlier philosophers. Reid, for example, distinguishes between consciousness and reflection. It will shed further light on our view if we compare it briefly with Reid’s.

“Consciousness,” Reid says, “is a word used by philosophers, to signify that immediate knowledge which we have of our present thoughts and purposes, and, in general, of all the present operations of our minds” (T. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 10). But consciousness, Reid explains, is not the same as paying attention, for “we are conscious of many things to which we give little or no attention” (Reid, p. 34). Attention resides in another kind of mental act:

It is in our power, however, when we come to the years of understanding, to give attention to our own thoughts and passions, and the various operations of our minds. And when we make these the objects of our attention, either while they are present, or when they are recent and fresh in our memory, this act of the mind is called reflection.

(Reid, p. 35)

This act of reflection, according to Reid, is like the act of seeing in that “it gives a like conviction with regard to internal objects, or things in the mind, as the faculty of seeing gives with regard to objects of sight” (Reid, p. 35). The main difference between Reid’s and our account seems to be that he conceives of consciousness as giving us knowledge about the workings of the mind, while we insist that only reflection gives us such knowledge. Experience, which seems to correspond to Reid’s consciousness, we have maintained, is not knowledge. But we agree with Reid that reflection is to mental things what perception is to perceptual objects. Just as we know perceptual objects by means of perception, so do we know mental things by means of reflection. However, there are also passages in Reid which demand a different interpretation. On page 551 of the Essays, he states that consciousness “gives the like immediate knowledge of things in the mind,. . . . as the senses give us of things external.” At this place, it is not reflection that is compared to perception, but rather consciousness. And here reflection, too, seems to acquire a different function:

Consciousness, being a kind of internal sense, can no more give us distinct and accurate notions of the operations of our minds than the external senses can give of external objects. Reflection upon the operations of our minds is the same kind of operation with that by which we form distinct notions of external objects. They differ not in their nature, but in this only, that one is employed about external and the other about internal objects; and both may, with equal propriety, be called reflection.

(Reid, p. 552)

According to our view, reflection is a unique mental act that cannot intend external objects. It is not some kind of “thinking about” or “contemplating.” As I said before, it is to mental things what perception is to perceptual objects.

Perhaps these quotations from Reid can be reconciled with each other. Perhaps, his view can be summarized in the following three theses. (1) There is an inner sense, consciousness, which yields knowledge of the operations of the mind, just as the outer sense, perception, yields knowledge of external objects. (2) In addition to this inner sense and this outer sense, in addition to consciousness and perception, there exists a different kind of mental act, namely, reflection. (3) To reflect is to pay attention either to an object of inner sense or to an object of perception. If this is Reid’s view, and I am not at all sure that it is, then we disagree with him on the following important points.

Firstly, experience is not to mental things what perception is to external objects; for to perceive something is to pay attention to it, while we do not pay attention to the mental things which we experience. Rather, what corresponds to perception in regard to outer objects is reflection on mental things. There is a fundamental asymmetry between “inner sense” and “outer sense.” This asymmetry is of the essence of the mind. It consists in the fact that mental things are “given to us” in two completely different ways, while perceptual objects are only “presented to us” in one way. A desire, for example, can be experienced or it can be reflected upon, while an apple can only be perceived.

Secondly, there exists no mental act of reflection on perceptual objects. Of course, one may reflect upon the fate of mankind, that is, one may think about it. But what we have here is not a particular kind of act, but a certain kind of mental process. This mental process consists of many kinds of mental acts: one may judge things, remember circumstances, wish for things, regret sorry states of affairs, and so on.

Thirdly, and for our immediate purpose most importantly, attention does not consist of a special kind of mental act. Attention, it should be pointed out, has posed a dilemma to introspective psychologists. It either consists of a mental act of paying attention or else it does not. If it is not a mental act, what could it possibly be? It is not a sensation or an image; nor is it a feeling or a mood. Thus we are moved to consider the first possibility. But attention does not seem to be a mental act either. For if we perceive something, and thus pay attention to it, then there occurs an act of perception, but a separate act of paying attention cannot be found. When we think of something, there occur acts of judgment (assertion), acts of remembering, acts of assuming, etc., but again, no act of paying attention can be discovered. And similarly for desires, hopes, questions, and other kinds of mental acts: No separate act of paying attention occurs. Therefore, attention seems to have to be a mental act, and yet no such separate act of paying attention can be found.

It may well be that the problem of attention led to Reid’s claim that in addition to the perception of perceptual objects there is also a reflection upon them. He must have noticed that to have a desire is not the same as to pay attention to it. Thus he distinguished between consciousness and reflection, and identified reflection with paying attention. But since he also believed that consciousness is an inner sense, comparable to the outer sense of perception, he concluded that just as the mere consciousness of a mental thing is not the same as paying attention to it, so the mere perception of an external object is not the same as paying attention to it. Therefore, he postulated reflection for external objects. He invented a special act of paying attention, reflection, which, when directed toward mental things, would yield knowledge of mental things, and when directed toward perceptual objects, would yield knowledge of external objects. But there is no such separate act of paying attention. This is clearly shown in the case of perception: to perceive something is to pay attention to it.

The problem of the nature of attention finds an easy answer in our view. It is true that there is no separate mental act of paying attention. And it is also true that it is not a sensation, feeling, image, etc. To pay attention to something is to have it “before” the mind. To be more precise, what one pays attention to is always the object of a mental act which is part of one’s conscious state, that is, which is experienced. What is merely experienced, what is part of the conscious state, is not an object of attention. When you experience a desire, you do not pay attention to the desire, but to its object. When you inspect your desire, when you pay attention to it, your desire is the object of an act which is experienced, namely, of an act of reflection. When you pay attention to your desire, as shown in figure 8, you do not pay attention to the object of your desire, because this object is not the object of an act which is experienced. Rather, it is the object of an act which is reflected upon. In this situation, therefore, you do not pay attention to (a) the experience of the act of reflection, (b) the act of reflection, and (c) the object of your desire. You only pay attention to the object of the act which is part of your conscious state, which is experienced, that is, to the object of the act of reflection, that is, to the desire.

Figure 8

d) Brentano and the Doctrine of Secondary Objects

Brentano distinguishes between inner perception and inner observation (F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, vol. I, book I, chap. 2). Just as in Reid’s case, there is some similarity between his distinction and our own between experience and reflection. But Brentano, as so often in his philosophical investigations of the mind, adds a special twist to his characterization of “inner perception.” In order to fully understand this feature of his theory, we must briefly consider a traditional argument against the existence of mental acts.

According to this argument, we can show that if there exists a mental act, A₁, then there exist also an infinite number of further mental acts, A₂, A₃, A₄, etc. But experience shows that there never exists such an infinite series of acts in one mind. It follows, therefore, that no mental act at all exists. In detail, the argument proceeds like this. Assume that A₁ occurs in a mind. When A₁ occurs in a mind, the mind is conscious of A₁; for to occur in a mind is for the mind to be aware of what occurs in it. But this means that there must be a second mental act, A₂, which is the consciousness of A₁; for to be conscious of something is the same as for a mental act of consciousness to occur. But if A₂ occurs in the mind, the mind must also be conscious of it. Hence there must occur another act, A₃, which is the consciousness of A₂. And so on.

It is clear that this argument uses two crucial assumptions:

According to Brentano, the consciousness of a mental act does not consist of another act. Rather, every act is its own consciousness. This is the fascinating twist I announced earlier: The inner perception of a mental act A₁ is furnished by the act A₁ itself. A₁, as Brentano puts it, is its own secondary object. Assume that there occurs the hearing of a tone. This act, according to Brentano, has the tone as its primary object. But it also has a secondary object, namely, the act of hearing itself. See figure 9 for a diagram of this view.

Figure 9

Like a snake with two heads, the act of hearing points simultaneously at two different objects: It points at the tone, but it also bites its own tail, as indicated by the broken looping arrow in figure 9. In this way, every mental act is its own “perception.”

Brentano’s rejection of (2) avoids the infinite regress. If A₁ occurs, then it is true, as (1) says, that the mind is conscious of A₁. But this consciousness does not consist in another mental act. A₁ is its own consciousness. Thus there need not occur a second mental act A₂. But as brilliant as this thesis about the peculiar interlacing of an act with its own consciousness is, it seems to me to be false. If Brentano’s thesis were true, then it would follow that one hears not only tones, melodies, pitches, and the like, but also acts of hearing. If his thesis were true, then one would not, properly speaking, be conscious or aware of the act of hearing, but hear it. And this I take to be false. An act of hearing, I submit, cannot be heard. What does it sound like? What is its pitch? Clearly mental acts have no sound and no pitch. And just as one cannot hear an act of hearing, so can one not see an act of seeing.

In contrast to Brentano, I reject the first premise of the argument, the premise that a mind is conscious of every act that belongs to it. This rejection was implied earlier by my characterization of a mental state. A mental state, I said, has two essential parts: An act of experience and what is experienced, the conscious state. It follows that at any given moment, part of the mind is not experienced, that is, that the mind is not conscious, not aware, of this part. This part, of course, is the act of experience itself. By means of it, the mind experiences what it experiences, but it does not experience this experiencing. Using a different terminology to say the same thing, the mind always consists of a conscious part, the conscious state, and an “unconscious” part, the act of experiencing. Needless to say, this notion of the unconscious is completely different from Freud’s. We shall see later how the Freudian conception fares, according to our analysis of the structure of the mind.

By the way, Sartre, in his inimitable way, goes a step farther than Brentano and reduces Brentano’s doctrine of the self-consciousness of every act to absurdity. According to Sartre, the ego appears only before reflective consciousness, that is, the ego appears only before a mental act whose object is another mental act; for example, if one remembers a past perceiving (see Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego). How do we know that the ego does not also appear before unreflective consciousness? We cannot possibly “take a look” at unreflective consciousness, for if we do, we turn unreflective consciousness into reflected upon consciousness. But if we cannot “take a look,” how are we to answer our question? Sartre sees the problem for his analysis and tries to solve it by invoking the self-consciousness of every mental act. Since every mental act is its own consciousness, he claims, there is also a memory which does not consist of a separate act (Sartre, 1988, p. 46). He maintains that, say, an act of seeing is not only a consciousness of itself, but also a memory of itself. He seems to argue that just as there is a consciousness of the act of seeing without there being a separate act of consciousness, so there is a remembering of the act of seeing without there being a separate act of remembering. I must confess that this view makes even less sense to me than Brentano’s peculiar doctrine. Nor am I persuaded of his view when I read how Sartre proposes to reflect upon consciousness without reflecting upon it:

That consciousness [for example, the act of seeing] must not be posited as object of a reflection. On the contrary, I must direct my attention on the revived objects [the seen landscape], but without losing sight of the unreflective consciousness, by joining in a sort of conspiracy with it and by drawing up an inventory of its content in a non-positional manner.

(Sartre, 1988, p. 46)

What a typically Sartrian solution: The mind conspires with itself against itself!