Étienne Bonnot de Condillac: Traité des sensations (1754)

When I last spoke ofCondillac, I mentioned that he was interested of the phenomenon of feral children, that is, children that grew up in savage conditions, without any contact to humans, and therefore did not have any possibility to learn language – he especially mentions a case of a child being raised by bears in Lithuania. Obviously such a child cannot have all the mental capacities of a child raised in civilised surroundings, but Condillac emphasises more what the child can do – e.g. distinguish herself from her surroundings, make generalisations and simple logical deductions etc.

A natural problematic is then how much of conceptual infrastructure a conscious being would have, if its mental capacities were diminished from those of an average human being. Condillac proposes an interesting thought experiment to this effect: let us consider a living statue that would otherwise resemble a human being, but would have only one sense, say, smell, and see what concepts this person could have.

It seems rather arbitrary why Condillac would have picked up smell as the starting point, but apparently Buffon considered it to be actually a sort of primary sense with animals. Indeed, we could well imagine an organism (probably living in water) that would only react to the presence of some harmful chemical by running away and to the presence of beneficial chemical by moving towards the supposed source of the chemical.

Condillac supposes that even an entity with such meager sensory input would have all sorts of ideas. He would notice that odours change, he could recognise some odours as resembling previous odours and he might classify odours into e.g pleasant, neutral and disagreeable. Furthermore, he could think of himself as the subject of the changing pattern of odours and he could associate pleasantness of the odours with his own well-being. Of course, in all of this Condillac supposes, just like in his first work, that no new mental capacities are required for passing from mere sensation to memory, intellect etc.

What is more interesting is the set of ideas that the odour-limited human being would not have. Clearly with mere smells there is no sense of space, but Condillac notes that temporal consciousness would also be deficient, because one couldn't make realiabe measurements of the passing of odours. Furthermore, the Condillacian statue would not have any notion of things separate from himself, as she would have no idea that odours were something else than just ever changing part of her own mental life.

Condillac then considers what would happen if the sense of smell would be changed to taste or hearing – nothing much is the expected conclusion. Even a combination of two or all of these three senses would not change the situation much. At most, the statue could make comparisons between the sensations of different sense and would then note that e.g. odours are somehow different from sounds. We might then also in a sense measure the progress of sensations of one sense by comparing it with the progress of sensations on another sense, thus making the notion of time more concrete.

Rather unexpectedly, the case of vision is not that different, says Condillac. True, a statue with nothing but vision would have an idea of two-dimensional space, but it could not have any notion of three-dimensional space nor of any bodies independent of the statue. One might object to Condillac that while a field of vision truly is two-dimensional, movement and ensuing changes in visual images would make the statue able to conceive three-dimensionality. Indeed, this is what philosophers like Descartes had assumed – we could geometrically count e.g. the distance of ourselves from an object just from its shape and apparent size, when looked at different angles.

Condillac is here following Berkeleyan criticism of the traditional Cartesian theory of vision: without the help of other senses, constantly changing visual images would appear incomprehensible. It is only by associating different groups of variable visual images to different tactile sensations that we can truly see e.g. a rose as an object independent of ourselves. The addition of touch thus perfects the human statue at least to a level of a feral child.

One might wonder, which side of the debate is more correct. Certainly the theory of Cartesians cannot be true in the sense that we would consciously make difficult calculations in order to make sense of our visual field. Still, we might suppose human beings have an automatic and instinctual ”program” that would calculate the results without any need of actual calculation. A more convincing argument against Cartesians would be that movement in a computer-generated virtual space does feel a bit weird, possibly because the tactual sensations do not correspond with what we see.

So much for Condillac, next time I shall turn my attention to an English philosopher.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac: Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746)

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.