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| Enlightenment thinker Condillac (1714 - 1780) |
If one wanted to
name one philosopher as the strongest influence on works of abbé
Condillac, it would clearly be John Locke, which is shown well by
Condillac's first book, which investigates the origin of human
knowledge. Almost all other modern philosophers are discarded,
because they have based their philosophies on abstract principles,
which Condillac considers to be a completely topsy-turvy method,
because such principles are usually the most difficult topic to
master properly. Condillac makes especially fun of Christian Wolff's
metaphysics: Wolff defines e.g. existence as a complement of
possibility, although this statement tells us almost nothing about
existence or possibility, and indeed, fails to note that existence is
actually the more fundamental notion.
It is then no wonder
that Condillac instead wants to begin with what we experience.
Experience provides us with ideas, which we then can use as building
material for further ideas (e.g. we can abstract the idea of
horseness from ideas of individual horses, or we could combine idea
of a headless body of a horse and idea of human head to form the idea
of centaur). It is by analyzing the genesis of our ideas that we make
them clearer and gain a better understanding of what we actually
know, while of abstract principles and concepts we usually have only
a very murky idea. This is all very Lockean, as is the division of
ideas into simple (certain shade of green) and complex (green apple).
What Condillac
develops more than Locke is the psychological framework of different
mental capacities required for turning perceptions into knowledge and
complete science. What is truly remarkable is Condillac's attempt
to reduce all mental phenomena into nothing more than sensation and
attention. It is undoubtedly to be expected that according to an
empiricist sensation would be the origin or basis of knowledge, but
it truly appears radical to say that sensation is almost all there is
to human mind. Thus, we sense things and we can choose some object as
the focus of our sensation, but we can also focus our attention on
the fact that what we now sense is something that we have sensed
earlier – this is just what memory is about and therefore,
Condillac concludes, memory is just another form of sensation.
Now, I find this
reduction of all mental faculties into sensation deeply problematic,
because there could be organisms that sense, but still fail to have
e,g. memory. Such an organism could, for instance, note the presence
of a certain chemical, detrimental to its condition, in its
environment and then react with a movement taking its backwards, away
from the source of that chemical. There's no need for any memory,
just an unpleasant feeling and an automated reaction to that feeling.
The existence of such an organism would be even evolutionarily
reasonable, because this capacity would greatly enhance the survival
of such an organism.
Indeed, a capacity
for memory appears to require something else – some way to storage
features of past sensations. Of course, this requirement of memory
storage seems more imminent in a materialistically grounded theory of
consciousness. Condillac, in yet another move away from Locke,
commits himself to a non-materialistic theory of soul, and for
reasons that strikingly remind one of Wolffian psychology:
self-consciousness just cannot be explained through a complex substance. It is probably more reasonable to suppose that to such an
immaterial soul it is just a matter of directing your attention to
view some sensation as resembling past sensations.
Yet another area in
which Condillac goes beyond Locke's philosophy is the role of
language, which Condillac admits is almost a necessity for more
abstract ideas and required, for instance, in advancing mathematics
beyond simple calculations. Condillac even provides the reader with a
hypothetical history of forms of language, starting from what
Condillac calls a language of action, by which he apparently means a
language using natural gestures and cries for communicating one's
thoughts and emotions to others.
It might be that
Condillac understood the importance of language from the example of
”wolf kids” who had grown up outside human communities and
learned language only later in their life – at least this is a
topic Condillac was quite interested of. It might also be an
inspiration for Condillac's main work, in which he experiments with
the idea of a person born without all the senses and upbringing of an
average Frenchman – but this is a topic I'll return to later.
