Immanuel Hermann Fichte: Outline of a system of philosophy. First division: knowledge as self-knowledge (1833)

If in the last post we saw Fichte trying to determine the basic characteristic of a new philosophical system from the historical context and its requirements, in his Grundzüge zum Systeme der Philosophie. Erste Abtheilung: Das Erkennen als Selbsterkennen Fichte tries to determine what philosophy should be like from its very concept. Or, to be more precise, he begins by trying to define what the very concept of philosophy should be. Indeed, he adds, philosophy should begin from itself, which means just that philosophy should begin by determining what it means to do philosophy.

Fichte does not completely ignore the history of philosophy, and his outlook is that of many other German philosophers of the time: all the different philosophies are just moments of one whole, developing through periods of division into different systems and contraction of them into one whole. Still, he admits, this context is something we can just anticipate at the very beginning of philosophy and nothing we can assume. Remembering this, he says, we could still preliminarily note that different philosophical standpoints are its different self-definitions, and while further standpoints become more and more clear about the meaning of philosophy, in the very beginning we can have only the most universal and simplest definition of philosophy.

Beginning of philosophy is an indefinite notion, Fichte continues. It can mean a subjective drive to do philosophy. This drive can take many forms, depending on the individual, but it still is something we can find immediately in ourselves. Beyond these subjective drives, there is an objective beginning of a system. There can be only one objective beginning, Fichte emphasises, but finding it is not an easy task. Yet, what he wants to especially guard us against is confusing the objective beginning of philosophy with subjective beginnings. In fact, he adds, many philosophers have begun subjectively from historical conditions that have driven them to choose some concrete beginning. Such a beginning based on our subjective drive is arbitrary, because it works only for this particular individual, Fichte argues. He mentions several such subjective beginnings, which all happen to be ways other recent German philosophers began their philosophies: I of the older Fichte, identity of subjective and objective from Schelling and Hegelian being that equals nothing.

Although Fichte insists on not confusing objective and subjective beginning of philosophy, he suggests that the objective beginning could be found through the subjective beginning – that is, although we should not take any particular subjective beginning as the objective beginning, we could determine objective beginning from the very fact that we do have subjective drives toward making philosophy. This means, he explains, returning to the absolute beginning of our thinking: what made us do philosophy? This is the only way to discover a foundation for philosophy, he adds. Naturally, the beginning cannot be justified through any arguments, since it is supposed to predate anything else in our thinking. Still, we should be able to discover it as a beginning for all our cognitive abilities.

What then is this subjective drive to philosophy? Fichte describes it as a decision to think. In other words, it is a decision to move from the immediate state of consciousness and its given content through cognitive labour to knowledge of truth. This drive is still just an indefinite craving for a higher cognition and it can be further determined only within philosophy. Since we already know many things in our immediate state of consciousness, the question arises why is this not enough. Fichte explains, quite in the manner of the first chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit, that the content of our immediate state of consciousness is variable and with the destruction of this content the supposedly true knowledge becomes untrue. Thus, in striving to do philosophy we search for proper stable knowledge, because consciousness can rest only with such knowledge.

Fichte has thus discovered the opposition between knowledge of variable and contingent matters and knowledge of non-variable, eternal, necessary and lawlike matters. Furthermore, he adds, this latter type of knowledge can be achieved only through a certain activity, which he preliminarily calls thinking. This knowledge of eternal matters Fichte names science. Problem is that there are many particular sciences and we thus have to distinguish philosophy in particular from the other sciences. Fichte notes that the other individual sciences have particular topics, while philosophy does not. Indeed, such an individualisation of topics is even against the notion of philosophy, because philosophy should be the universal science. Fichte then defines philosophy as the science of sciences, that is, as knowledge of the highest and most universal laws of all being and cognition.

The next obvious question is what is this activity of thinking that is supposed to be required for realising philosophy. Fichte notes that to understand what thinking is we must ourselves think, because only the activity of thinking makes us internalise our concepts. In other words, to become thinkers we must see how to progress from the immediate state of non-thinking to thinking. Indeed, this is for Fichte the only universally valid objective beginning of philosophy. At the same time, since this progression is the development of our consciousness, the beginning or the first part of philosophy must be a theory of consciousness or the study of the faculty of cognition.

At the beginning of this study, we know very little about consciousness. Indeed, the only thing we should know is what our beginning from the subjective drive determined: we know immediately only contingent and variable matters, but we should strive to know what is necessary and stable. If the object of our striving Fichte named thinking, he calls its beginning perceiving. What other states possibly lie between these two extremes is yet unknown. Still, we do know we have to begin from the immediate state of consciousness, because nothing else is given to us. Indeed, Fichte adds, we can never really escape the standpoint of our consciousness, and other things come into our attention only when they are revealed to our consciousness.

Fichte notes that the transition from perception to thinking is not possible, unless there’s something common that stays the same between these two states. The simple solution is that this common element is our being conscious of these states or our self. This consciousness, Fichte explains, is then a stable unity in comparison with a variable manifold of states, which are then like images representing some content that exists independently of the consciousness and toward which it just points without making it. Fichte describes this content as being (Sein) in relation to non-objective image (Bild), both of which are concepts mutually determining one another: image has the content of being as reflected, while being has the same content as not reflected. Consciousness then consists of placing being and image in opposition and of connecting them as inseparable.

Consciousness can relate being and image, Fichte continues, only through a higher image, where consciousness ponders its own activity of opposing and relating being and image. In other words, he explains further, consciousness must be an image that conceives itself to be an image in opposition to being. This more complex state of consciousness Fichte calls self-consciousness. In this complex state, consciousness is thus aware of being in some determined state of consciousness, but also of its own self as a resting unity behind these particular states. The self Fichte describes as purely self-transparent and self-knowing unity in multiplicity. Because it thus has an essential link to these multiple states, it can exist only in connection with determinate consciousness. Consciousness must thus always be determined or in particular conditions, while the self is a formal unity for the variable content.

The first state the self or consciousness finds itself in Fichte calls Empfindung, which we might translate in this context as sensation: consciousness has given, determined affections, content of which it cannot change. These on-going sensations form the external world, and the self becomes gradually aware of being distinct from this external world. The receptivity to this necessary effect of the external world on the self Fichte calls Sinn, which somewhat confusingly we should also translate as sense or sensation. Still, this passive receptivity is the original root of our consciousness.

Now, we do not have just one, but many sensations, which are differentiated from one another spatially and temporally. In a Kantian fashion, Fichte notes that our faculty of sensation is based on an intuition of space and time, which enable the differentiation of sensations. Yet, he immediately adds, this intuition is actually just an abstraction or indicates a mere possibility of differentiating sensations, since we always intuit space and time only as filled by sensations. Following the lead of his father, Fichte notes that we also intuit ourselves as in space and time, which means that we have an immediate spatio-temporal presence or a body. Compared to abstractions of pure space and time, the body is our actualised receptivity. It is also our immediate individuality and we exist only as embodied.

Fichte notes in passing that receptivity of our body is divided into individual senses, but adds immediately that a more detailed study of these senses is the task of, on the one hand, psychology (when it comes to sensations as conscious states, and on the other hand, physiology (when the sensations are taken as preconscious state of our bodily presence). What is important for the theory of consciousness is that these various sensations received by different senses (cold, warm, sweet, sour, etc.) are the material elements of our consciousness. Furthermore, they act as stimuli that make the soul first sense itself as separate from what is sensed, then to consciousness proper and finally to self-consciousness. Fichte explains that, in a sense, self-consciousness is present even in the first sensations, since only self-conscious entities can sense, but it is still, as it were, sleeping and awakened only by the external stimuli. One could thus say that the sensations as the first state of consciousness already drive the consciousness to proceed to further states of its development.

Although consciousness has been thus far described as mere passive receptivity, Fichte explains that its feeling of being restricted by sensations brings immediately forth an opposed tendency to appropriate what is external to it. This opposite tendency is will, and as it also needs the stimulus of sensations, it must be embodied. Indeed, Fichte says, the first act of will is its mastery over its own body, which is then an absolute tool of the will. The embodied will or drive develops different goals, which it tries to achieve through an ordered series of actions.

Creation of this ordering, Fichte concludes, is performed by a third faculty besides sensation and will, which remains neutral and mediates between passive sensation and active will. In effect, this third faculty is the free representation of ideas in our consciousness. This faculty of representation is the true centre of consciousness, which both conserves sensations and makes them the property of consciousness by renewing them, but also creates new ones, through which it leads the will. Thus, the representative activity has as its parts both memory and imagination. Awakened by the first strike of sensation, consciousness changes sensation into an inner representation and thus makes it into its own property. When new sensations constantly arise, the internal flow of these representations becomes self-imagination, which both conserves sensed representations and forms new ones. This flow of representations works then as a material for further development of the whole cognition and for the actions of the will. The three faculties of sensation, representation and will are thus entwined to one another, Fichte insists, and indeed, just aspects of one faculty of representation.

The main conclusion of Fichte’s study has been that the representative consciousness is determined by spatio-temporal sensations. This, he explains, is the essence of perception, which was the supposed starting point of the development of consciousness to thinking. Yet, he says, even the perception has its own development, and in its first state it is just an undeveloped sensation, where the consciousness just passively observes what it senses. In this specific state, confused sense impressions flow in the consciousness that still cannot separate anything determinate from this flow and that cannot even separate itself from these external representations. In a sense then, while plenty is observed, nothing is yet known, since there are yet no distinctions or comparisons.

Without really any evidence, Fichte speculates that children live in such a state at the first moments of their lives. In such a state, the sensations are felt more intensively and strongly and thus awaken the consciousness forcefully. He also assumes, again without much evidence, that we might return to such a state during severe depression, especially if it proceeds to a level of complete stupor. In the posts to come, we shall see how Fichte thinks consciousness will develop from this supposed starting point to its final phase, where it should be capable of doing philosophy.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, First part, Ideology in the proper sense (1804)

(1754-1836)

Destutt de Tracy is a figure I should have considered far earlier. His influence especially on Maine de Biran’s philosophy is remarkable, but even Ricardo borrowed a few quotations from his work. His probably most important work, Élémens d'idéologie, was originally meant as a textbook for the growing citizens of revolutionary France. The work and especially it first part on Idéologie proprement dite was intended as a sort of theory of theories, that is, a kind of methodological bedrock, upon which all the other sciences could be founded.

The name of the science, which Destutt de Tracy supposed to have found, ideology, refers back to Lockean term “idea”, which described the elements of human mental life - ideas was whatever we happened to have in our minds while thinking something. Thus, the primary question of this science of ideology, for Destutt de Tracy, was what we do when we happen to think. His simple answer was that all thinking was actually sensing, where sensations could be had not just of things outside us, but also of our own internal states. In a sense, one can undoubtedly ascribe to this idea - if by sensing we mean being aware or conscious of something, certainly when we are pondering something, we are conscious or aware of this something. The major unanswered question is whether this description merely loses some essential differences within our mental life - that is, whether being conscious of what lies in front of our eyes isn’t quite different from being conscious of, say, memory of what lied before my eyes yesterday.

Indeed, de Tracy himself admits as much, when he divides sensations into four different species: sensations proper, memories, judgements and volitions. Still, even here we find that de Tracy emphasises more their unity than their diversity. Firstly, he quite correctly points out that these four types rarely occur in isolation, but an individual experience is often a combination of many sorts of sensations - when we perceive an apple, we may also remember the taste of other apples, judge that the taste of an apple would be pleasant and desire to eat this particular apple. Secondly, de Tracy constantly emphasises that even memories, judgements and volitions are still just sensations. This insistence makes de Tracy’s idea of judgements and volitions especially peculiar. Judgements, he says, are nothing but sensations of agreement between other sensations or ideas. That is, judgement is not an active assertion of such an agreement, but just a passive perception of it. Similarly, volition is not for de Tracy an act of wanting something, but merely a passive perception of a need.

De Tracy appears to be quite oblivious of the possibility of describing mental life as consisting of acts rather than through mere concept of awareness. This ignorance might well be behind his opinion that all other supposed species of thinking or mental life reduce to the four basic types. For instance, attention is, according to de Tracy, no independent form of sensation, since it is just quantitatively differentiated sensation proper, in which some part of a sensation has greater vividness than other parts. Or deduction is on his opinion just a concatenation of many judgements. One might object that attention is quite a different act from mere perception or sensation - it is an active concentration on some part of sensation - while reasoning or deducing is quite a different act than mere judgement - it is an act of justifying one judgement through others.

Despite de Tracy’s rather passive notion of sensation, he does not completely forget the active side of human being. Instead, he speaks of active muscular movement as the other necessary ingredient of human life. This muscular movement is peculiarly connected with the type of sensations called volition - when we move voluntarily, we feel both a desire to move in a peculiar manner and at the same time the actual activity of our muscles. This combination forms our sense of self. On the other hand, when we feel that our movements are hindered, we conclude at once that this hindering is caused by another existing thing. Our activity is then our only link to the existence of other things.

Since the existence of other things is revealed especially through movement, de Tracy takes them to be especially characterised through attributes relating to movement. They can be moved, but they also resist attempts to be moved, and together these two features imply that they can also impart movement to other things. Space and time are then in a sense abstractions from movement. Duration is generally something pertinent to all processes, including movement, and duration becomes time, when we choose one type of movement - for instance, apparent movement of the sun around earth - for measuring how long some processes take. Distances are compared according to how long it takes us to traverse them with a constant effort, and when similarly a scale of measure is applied to them, we get a metric space. Because all things we can experience have limits in space, we get different shapes and can do basic geometry.

Something which Maine de Biran was to investigate was more detail was the influence of habit to our different mental faculties. Still, we can find some basic details of Maine de Biran’s theories already implicit with de Tracy. Habit makes mental activities easier and at the same weakens the vividness of the sensations - we can do more, but we are less aware of doing it. Indeed, one might ask if in this description de Tracy is implicitly accepting the idea that mental acts are something completely different from mental awareness and that both are necessary ingredients of human mental life.

The final chapters of de Tracy’s work provide a link to the following parts of Ideology. He investigates the use of signs in general and language in particular. De Tracy notes that we have a sort of natural language, consisting of gestures and interjections. Yet, it is only a proper language, in which the use of sounds and inscriptions is codified, that lets us truly think beyond some simple sensations - for instance, we couldn’t really understand mathematical truths, unless we could speak of units and their sums. But this is already more appropriate topic for de Tracy’s next book on grammar.

Maine de Biran: Considerations on the influence of habit (1800 and 1802)

1766-1824

Marie-François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran - or as he is usually called, Maine de Biran - counted himself in the so-called ideological tradition of philosophy, continuing and building upon the works of Condillac and Cabanis - at least in his first major work, Mémoires sur l'influence de l'habitude, published in two parts. The word “ideology” does not refer to any political set of opinions, but to the Lockean habit of calling the basic elements of human consciousness ideas.

Although Maine de Biran identifies his work with the tradition beginning with Locke and Condillac, he is also extremely critical of the somewhat speculative manner in which the two gentlemen carried out their project. Instead, he is eager to follow Cabanis in his attempt to ground human mentality in concrete physiological studies. Thus, his first task is to differentiate between sensations and perceptions in physiological terms and not just by defining perceptions as a clearer form of perceptions. In fact, Maine de Biran appears at times even to suggest that when sensations have more clarity, perceptions are less clear, and vice versa.

In the first book, Maine de Biran suggests a quite concrete physiological difference between sensations and perceptions, sensation being an affection of sensory organ, while perception is formed by brain acting upon such affections. In the second book, the difference is laid out in more abstract terms - while sensations are passive, perceptions are active, just like nervous system consists of affective and motive nerves. In effect, Maine de Biran is giving a new physiological twist on the old idea of the difference between cognition and volition.

Since sensations and perceptions are two quite different and even opposed states of human mind, it is quite easy to see why making one stronger will weaken the other - if we are overwhelmed by strong sensory effects, we are far more likely to lose our ability to perceive the objects around us clearly. Then again, when the force of new sensations subsides, for instance, when we become accustomed to them, it is far easier to e.g. distinguish objects around us.

The example above shows us also an example of the supposed main topic of the book - the influence of habit. Indeed, it is just this habit of having sensations that allows us to have more control over our perceptions. This habit makes it easier for us to decide what aspects of our sensory field do we want to concentrate on, just like practicing any activity will make that activity easier for us.

Yet, Maine de Biran continues, habit is not just a positive force. This is especially the case with our imagination fathoming combinations between two quite distinct things: for instance, whenever we’ve seen one event following another, we easily conclude that one is the cause of the other, although there wouldn’t actually be any connection between them.

If imagination is involuntary and passive association of our ideas, the corresponding active movement from one idea to another Maine de Biran calls memory. Memory, he says, is essentially based on taking some sounds or inscriptions as signs of our ideas, and through their means actively recollecting the ideas associated with them. The recollection might stop at the level of mere signs, and then we are dealing with mechanic memory, that is, with mere repetition of a string of signs or words, known by heart. Then again, words might recollect, not ideas, but mere unclear feelings, and then we are dealing with sensitive memory - this is the faculty of poets and mystic philosophers.

The perfect mode of memory or representative memory works in many cases in close cooperation with the two other modes of memory. For instance, Maine de Biran points out that when we use words from ethics, such as good or virtue, we do attach to these words clear representations, but also certain affective emotions. Further complications arise from the fact that the representative memory has to sometimes deal with abstractions like time and space, which refer to a number of ideas.

A further level of habituation generates judgements - that is, a judgement is born when we frequently associate some ideas and signs together. If this association is made quite passively, the judgement is mechanical - like when we repeat the multiplication table by rote - but when we actually follow the train of ideas and signs we are dealing with a reflective judgement. Finally, the effect of habituation on judgements might again be either passive and harmful or active and beneficial. We might associate judgements which have nothing to do with one another, which leads to faulty reasoning. It is then no wonder that Maine de Biran concludes with the thought of representing all judgements in a Leibnizian-style universal calcul, which would allow perfect reasoning, like in mathematics.

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.