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.

James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind 2 - Yawns and hiccups

The latter part of the second volume of Mill’s book concerns the active or volitional part of the human mind. Mill notes that the cognitive and volitional sides of human mind share the same structure - for instance, volitional side also deals with sensations and ideas. The difference is, Mill suggests, that while sensations of the theoretical part are, in a sense, indifferent to the mind, the sensations of the volitional part are not, being either pleasant or such that the mind would want prolong, or painful or such that the mind would want to stop them. Mill makes it sound like the trivision of sensations would be hard and fast, while one might object that e.g. a sensation pleasant now might become indifferent and even painful, if it has to be endured too long.

Like indifferent sensations, pleasant and painful - or interesting - sensations can also be revived in ideas, Mill says, and such ideas of pleasant and painful sensations are called desires and aversions. This choice of nomenclature seems peculiar. Mill himself points out one possible point of contention: we also say that we desire things like cake, which are not sensations. In fact, Mill says, in all such cases we ultimately desire some sensation, e.g. the taste of the cake. Yet, there is a more important point of contention, because we can think of a pleasure we’ve had without desiring it. Mill offers the explanation that desires are actually only ideas of future pleasures. This explanation seems insufficient, because we could think of future pleasures and still not yet desire them. Indeed, it seems far more plausible to take desire as a primitive concept, especially as Mill’s explanation of pleasures already implicitly referred to it (pleasure is a sensation we would want or desire to continue).

In case of pleasant and painful sensations, Mill continues, we also make associations to their causes. In fact, thinking about such causes might affect us more than thinking of the pleasures and pains themselves. For instance, we might think of a past stomach ache with indifference, but still avoid the food that we think caused this sickness at the time. Mill appears to think that such affections are not just caused, but also defined merely by such associations, which seems again insufficient - surely they also contain the aspect of us wanting to gain or avoid something.

Mill notes that we often have stronger affections toward more remote causes of pleasures and pains. For instance, people often desire wealth, power and dignity more than, say, food. Mill has a quite convincing explanation for this peculiarity: remote causes, like money, allow us to gain more and a larger variety of pleasures than mere immediate causes.

An important subset of affection toward remote causes concerns other persons. In some cases, Mill notes, such affections are awakened by shared experiences and common interests. Then again, he adds, we also have a general compassion toward all humans, because the similarities with them make us associate their pleasures and pains with our own pleasures and pains. The more similarities we have toward some group of people, the more affection we have for them, for instance, in case of people from the same class (in a pre-Marxist fashion, Mill insists that only privileged classes could have such a class consciousness).

Mill touches also aesthetic affections, but unfortunately, not in any great detail. His main point is that we call sensations beautiful and sublime not because of themselves, but because of associations they convey in us. Thus, the humming of a beetle is found beautiful, not because of any intrinsic feature, but because it awakens in us the notion of summer. Because such associations may vary from one person to another, there is no universal criterion of beauty, Mill concludes: black seems ugly in a culture, where it is associated with death, beautiful in a culture, where it is associated with festivities. What is especially lacking in Mill’s account is the explanation what kind of associations are required for calling something beautiful or sublime.

When we have an idea of ourselves as the only possible cause for gaining some future pleasure or for averting some future pain (or some of their causes), we have a motive, Mill defines. Clearly, this definition works only if we assume, like him, that all thoughts of future pleasures involve desire. In any case, motives can work against one another, and indeed, Mill insists, only another motive can prevent us putting one into action. Different people are affected in different measures by same motives, and a particular affinity to some motive is called disposition. Mill notes that in common parlance we often confuse affections, motives and dispositions: thus, we may speak of lust when speaking of a positive affection toward sex (idea of sex as causing desirable sensations), of a motive for engaging in sexual relations (idea of ourselves as instigators of sex) or of a disposition to engage in sexual relations.

In a Humean manner, Mill considers cause and effect to be nothing more than a name for a regular association of certain events. Thus, he sees no problem in saying that sensations cause certain bodily actions - we can say that a pungent odour makes us sneeze, while a certain sensation in our stomach makes us hiccup. These examples might make Mill’s analysis of causation seem suspect, since it seems more likely that in such cases the sensation is not really the cause of the bodily movement , but merely shares with it a common cause (some bodily process).

In any case, because Mill thinks sensations can produce bodily movements, he sees no difficulty in ideas causing them also. In fact, he points out laughter caused by humour or weeping caused by sadness as examples of this kind of causation. Of course, Mill adds, such uncontrolled weeping is still not voluntary action. What is still required is the presence of a desire: when motives make us act, they are called will.

Mill does not then believe in any motiveless will. He insists also that will cannot awaken its own motives - this would be like baron Munchhausen lifting himself from his own hair. This rather plausible suggestion makes Mill go even so far as to suggest that it has no effect on the train of ideas, being just a process of translating ideas into action. Mill considers two possible objections. First is the notion that we often seem to will to recollect something. Mill’s answer is that actually we always only desire to do so. Similarly, to the second objection that we often will to attend to some sensations or ideas, Mill answers that attending means just that we find these sensations or ideas interesting. Mill’s answers seem just verbal confusions, since he admits that the very element that makes acts into acts of will (desire or interest) is involved also in these two cases. One might even rephrase the objections in a manner suggesting that there is a choice involved. Suppose we are attending to something complex, like a bicycle. The idea we have of it has different aspects, and we may then choose to attend to one of these aspects, say, one of the tires. Couldn’t we then say that we willed or wanted to attend to the tire?

James Mill: Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind 1 (1829)

In my previous post on James Mill, I noted that he emphasised the need for the study of the human mind as a precondition for planning education. Mill tackles this very topic in his two-volumed Analysis. First volume, which I will be studying now, deals roughly with the theoretical side of the human mind, while the consideration of the practical side is left for the second volume.

Mill’s viewpoint is clearly empiricist and he begins with an assumption of Humean undertones that everything in our experience is reducible to sensations (what Hume would call impressions), ideas, formed on basis of sensations, and groups and trains of ideas, generated from sensations and ideas through association. Starting from sensations, he enumerates the usual smell, hearing, taste and sight, divides sensations of touch into sensations of (moderate) temperatures, sensations of tactile contact, sensations of disorganisation, such as pain or itch, and sensations involving muscular exertion, and adds the sensations belonging to alimentary canal and possibly also to other intestines.

Mill’s portrayal of these various types vary from ordinary to perplexing, latter being exemplified by his insistence that the effects of opium are sensed in the alimentary canal and just strengthened by associated ideas. Indeed, one might argue that Mill should have added a separate class for clearly pleasurable sensations, such as is occasioned by stimulation of various substances and sex. In any case, Mill makes an important remark that when speaking of sensations, at least English has a deplorable lack of distinct words for a) sensation of one kind (say, a smell), b) whatever causes this sensation (also known as smell) and c) the organ for this type of sensation (yet again, smell).

Ideas, Mill continues, are then traces of sensations. While we have some say on what we sense e.g. by changing our position in relation to our environment, he affirms, we cannot control what ideas we will have or think about, because they are generated by sensations and other ideas through association. This association is governed, again in a Humean manner, by habit - if we are used to sensing various sensations or ideas together, either simultaneously or successively, we are bound to think one part of this group when another part is sensed or thought.

Although the account is rather simple, there are some questions that Mill leaves unanswered. For instance, Mill notes that in case of succession we are used to following the train of thoughts to the direction of the process involved: thus, a farmer is used to thinking of first planting the seed and then the seed sprouting. Problem is that we often think such processes in reverse and particularly do so, when looking for explanations, for instance, if we want to explain why plants grow, we think first of their growing and only then the idea of someone planting the seeds. Another problem is that Mill does not point out that there are associations, which appear to be a necessary product of the way we sense - for instance, a combination of colour with extension seems not just coincidental nor even one based on the nature of things sensed, but on a fact that we cannot sense coloured things, which are not extended.

Such groups and trains of ideas can, then, form a single idea out of many individual ideas, Mill says. Thus, since we are accustomed to sensing, say, a distinct rosy smell with a certain kind of sight, we tend to think of them as a single unit (a rose). Similarly, temporal trains of ideas should form complex ideas of processes.

The purpose of language, Mill suggests, is merely to communicate to others or to our future selves these various sensations and ideas, either individually or as complex trains of thought. Later on, he adds another purpose for the language, that is, making it possible to think of such otherwise difficult ideas like a polygon with hundred sides. This seems a very limited understanding of the purposes of language. Particularly, this appears not to note that sentences of a language are meant to indicate e.g. that something happens or happened, not just that we have sensed or thought something. Mill himself appears to be at least unconsciously aware of this, since he notes that all verbs carry with them the notion of existence. Yet, Mill uses “existence” here in a very strong sense, which makes him instantly think of this immediate connection as a detriment to language - if we speak of e.g. what chance is, Mill suggests, we immediately assume that chance is something existent, namely an individual object. It seems obvious that we need not go so far, in other words, when we say that chance is so and so, we truly affirm something about chance without assuming that chance is an individual existent.

The trains of thought we express in language indicate, Mill suggests, causal relations, relations of resemblance or different names for same things. The third option here is the most perplexing, since Mill includes in it such mathematical statements as one plus one equals two. One might accept this classification in such simple cases, but whenever the calculations become complex enough, it is doubtful that we have any concrete idea to name in both sides of the equation. For instance, can we really say we have a distinct idea of what 1000^1000 is meant to say? What this expression indicates is more like a certain task of calculation (multiply 1000 with itself 1000 times), and the sentence connecting this task to its result indicates a certain relation between numbers.

The remaining part of the first volume is dedicated to an analysis of certain central concepts of human cognition in terms of concepts introduced thus far. For instance, Mill suggests that consciousness means no feeling distinct from sensations and ideas, but is simply a general name for both of them: if I am conscious of something, I either sense or have an idea of it. Although one might agree with Mill that consciousness is nothing distinct from sensations and ideas, one might still ask in the manner of Leibniz whether consciousness - or better, conscious sensations and thoughts - could form a subspecies of all sensations and ideas. Indeed, we might assume that different sensations and ideas have various degrees of consciousness and by moving our attention to one aspect of a sensation or an idea we might become more aware of its components.

Of the concept of conception Mill notes that it simply refers to complex ideas. This is undoubtedly true description of how some thinkers have used the word or similar expressions in other language (say, Begriff in German). Yet, other thinkers seem to use concept and conception only in relation to linguistically expressed notions (thus, a mental image of a bicycle would not yet be a concept, whereas a linguistic expression “bicycle”, perhaps also with a definition of the expression, would certainly be). Related to this is the question whether conception is somehow active in comparison with mere sensation and “having an idea”. Mill suggests that the supposed activeness of conceiving is just a misdirection of the active form “I conceive” and that conceiving is as passive an event as dreaming or dying, which can also be expressed in an active form. While Mill’s point is well made, it could be that when philosophers have spoken of the activity of conception, they might have actually meant the relative independence of conceptions from external objects. After all, we can conceive things that do not exist, especially if conception is understood in a linguistic manner.

In case of imagination, Mill goes even farther in his redefinition of words and suggests that imagination is just a new term for having a train of ideas. This seems to go against all ways the word has been used. In an early modern discussion, imagination was closer to what we would nowadays call memory, meaning thinking of anything that isn’t currently present, even if we have perceived it earlier. Nowadays, we are mostly using imagination in the sense that Mill disparages as Dugald Stewart’s redefinition of the word: that is, imagination is a train of new thoughts. “It is implied in every wish of the child to fly”, Mill says, trying to be sarcastic, but we indeed speak of imaginative kids as having such inventive thoughts, often divorced from reality.

Especially confusing is Mill’s discussion of belief. He at first divides belief into three distinct classes: belief in events and real existences, belief in testimony and belief in the truth of propositions. Later he makes a reclassification, saying that belief in testimony is just a special case of a belief in events (those told by other people). Nowadays, many philosophers might want to classify all beliefs as concerning propositions, because the content of belief can be expressed as a proposition. On a closer look, Mill himself might agree, because he thinks that one part of beliefs in propositions, those concerning individual objects, are essentially beliefs in events and real existences (he would just have to make the assumption that all such beliefs can be expressed in propositions). This still leaves the problem that Mill’s account of propositions is too simple, allowing in principle only monadic predication - a problem we already saw in the case of his idea of mathematics.

An even bigger problem lies in Mill’s attempt to describe belief merely in terms of sensations, memories, associations and abstractions. For instance, he says that in the case of sensations and memories, belief means simply having them - if we sense something red or have a memory of it, we believe it. These cases already seem problematic. If Mill means just that having a sensation or having a memory is such an experience we can never doubt, we might accept that this is true, but this is, for the most part, not a very characteristic way to speak of belief (one might even say that only philosophers say things like “I believe I have a sensation of redness”, whereas usually people use the concept of belief only in cases where there is at least a possibility of things not being so). If, on the other hand, Mill would want to use the notion of belief here in a more substantial manner - say, as a belief that there is something that causes this sensation of redness or that there was something that I now remember as red - then we immediately see that belief is definitely not identical with sensation or memory. True, sensation and memory might well be evidence and occasion for such a belief, but there might still be doubt e.g. whether what we remember really was red and not blue.

Mill’s mistake is even clearer in his supposed examples of belief. If we spin around very fast and stop, we get the feeling of the earth spinning beneath us. Mill suggests that we also believe that earth is really spinning, which seems far-fetched. Even more, Mill makes a quick throwaway line that fearing something implies also believing in it - hence, he says, anyone who is afraid of ghosts must believe in them. A quick consideration makes Mill’s statement seem unfounded, even if he thought it so self-evident to need no justification. Picture a person hearing a strange noise in her house during the night. She might be afraid that there is a burglar in her house, but she might still be uncertain whether there is any burglar and thus not really believe in the existence of this burglar.

Indeed, Mill appears to make no distinction between modalities of actuality and possibility, belief being intimately related to the former - we might consider e.g. a sensation or memory, without being sure of its object being real. In the more complex cases, he says that habitual associations just are beliefs - if we tend to think of the sun rising after it has set, we believe that it will rise again after setting. Again, this regular or habitual association might be a ground for believing something, but there are cases where we might still have doubts, whether e.g. the sun will rise everyday for the whole infinity of time.

This is not to say Mill’s book is completely without merits. His account of abstraction is particularly interesting. Mill’s basic point is the difference between what calls notation and connotation. A word like “red” notes a certain property of individual objects, but it also connotes something, namely, those very objects that can be called red. In more modern terms, we might say Mill is here talking about the difference of intension and extension. Abstraction, then, means that we ignore the connotation of the word and think only of its notation: we think of redness without any reference to red things. Mill’s point is that abstractions are then nothing truly existent, but always dependent on the ignored connotation - there is no Platonic redness floating around without red objects.

Maine de Biran: New essays on anthropology (and other late writings)

While Maine de Biran’s works have thus far been exclusively psychological, his final, unpublished works show a new interest in religious experiences. Furthermore, while Maine de Biran began as a follower of ideological school of Destutt de Tracy and then moved away from this school through Kantian influence, in his last works Maine de Biran also wanted to distance himself from the conservative school of de Bonald and Lamennais. Although Maine de Biran did not have much to say about the politics of the French conservatives, he did ridicule their way of arguing with analogies - although body might be ruled by soul, one could not deduce from this that country should be ruled by a monarch.

In fact, Maine de Biran could not even accept de Bonald’s definition of human being as a soul or intelligence served by an organism. Firstly, he noted that one might equally well say that bodily organism is served by the guidance of intelligence. Furthermore, he added that both statements describe only a certain harmonious condition in which humans might exist, while often these two elements of human being are at odds with one another, and indeed, in the fallen state of humanity this discord is prevalent.

Maine de Biran did accept the basic dualistic account of human being, but unlike French conservatives, he expressly did not want to endorse it just because of religious authority. Instead, Maine de Biran held on to Platonistic notions, according to which human being can through introspection note that there’s something more stable than fleeting sensations. Means for rising to this stable, intellectual level were, for instance, love of not particular beauties, but beauty in general, and pure geometry.

In one of his last, unpublished works, Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie, de Biran tried to outline the basic structure of the whole human being - hence, the use of title anthropology, instead of the more usual psychology. Human being is not just soul or mental, de Biran wants to say, but also has its bodily aspect. On the other hand, against some physiologists of his time, de Biran wants to emphasise that mere organic processes cannot explain all of human behaviour. More precisely, de Biran wants to state that biology does not explain the mental side of human being. At most, it could tell us something about sensations, which we share with animals, but the consciousness of these sensations is still something beyond mere biology.

In addition to physiologists, de Biran also spoke against metaphysicians like Malebranche and Leibniz, who did accept the existence of body and soul, but then made their interaction into a divine mystery. Interestingly, de Biran notes, Malebranche and Leibniz faced this problem because of opposite reasons: Malebranche made human soul into something completely passive, which could not act on anything, without the help of God, while Leibniz thought that body was a complex of similar active monads as soul, but because of their activity, soul could not truly affect these other monads. The obvious solution to this conundrum is then, de Biran notes, that mental and physical sides of human being are, respectively, active and passive.

This basic notion of the difference of mental and physical de Biran connects with Kantian and Fichtean considerations. What de Biran is searching for is not soul as a substance, which at best is just an abstraction out of concrete experience of ourselves and at worst suggests that our mental side would be a substance in the same sense as all physical objects. Instead, de Biran says, when we begin from the very experience of ourselves as controlling our body, we perceive ourselves as activities or forces. De Biran appears to connect this activity that we are with will, which he distinguished from mere organic desires.

Just like Fichte before him, de Biran notes that this active I can break out from a solipsist outlook by noting that something hinders its own activity - we can justifiably belief in the existence of external world, because we cannot control everything. Furthermore, this hindrance extends even to our own bodies, which we at times must struggle to make obey our commands. This experience of willing to control an unwilling body, de Biran sometimes appears to suggest, contains a hint toward the final, unwritten part of his work, where he would have tried to argue for the existence of a personal God. De Biran’s particular target would have been pantheism of Spinoza and Schelling, where all things would have been modifications of one basic force. Instead, de Biran appears to suggest, the world is not swallowed by a single force, but we experience many contrary forces, although we have an inkling of a higher entity, which can use its force without any external hindrance.

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: Experiental study of soul as a foundation for all knowledge in its main branches (1820)

(1797-1854)

If you know German philosophy of early 19th century merely from summarised compendiums, you might think that only one line of thinkers followed Immanuel Kant: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. You might have read of Schopenhauer as an afterthought, especially if the compendium dealt with the whole of 19th century, but you would most likely not see any mention of Beneke. Still, he took Kantian philosophy in a direction completely different from any of the other thinkers mentioned above.

Beneke’s Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens in ihren Hauptzügen, a book about “study of soul” or psychology, is an example of this direction. The name of the book already reveals important duality in Beneke’s account of psychology. Firstly, he thinks that psychology should be based on experience and observations. Beneke notes that although empiricism has been an important philosophical school, empirical psychology has not been truly developed since the times of Plato and Aristotle. He remarks that this lack of development has been mostly due to prejudices obscuring this topic, although soul - our own mental life - should be something quite familiar to us. Hence, empiricists have been more successful with natural than human sciences.

Secondly, Beneke notes that psychology is important due to a speculative or idealistic principle. What Beneke means by this principle is not any metaphysical theory about the nature of reality as such nor is it any attempt to explain the essence of soul, like Wolffian rational psychology had been. Instead, Beneke just emphasises the rather obvious truth that we humans can never have any access to any supposedly “neutral”, “completely objective” or God’s viewpoint. Thus, all science is science made by and for humans and study of human beings or psychology must then be the foundation of all science.

Beneke is of the opinion that Kantian philosophy united at least in some sense these two complementary viewpoints. Yet, the problem of Kant’s philosophy and his most famous followers, Beneke suggested, was that they didn’t attempt to make precise observation of human mental life. Beneke himself holds that psychology should use a Euclidean method - his suggestion seems to be that psychology should find the most basic elements of human mental life and explain everything else in mental life through these elements, just like Euclid explained geometry through simple elements, like points and lines.

Beneke’s first task is then to identify basic activities of human mental life. He notes that there are three such activities. The first one of these humans share with all animals, that is, the activity involved with the maintenance of animal body. The second activity consists then of sensory activity, and finally, the third consists of muscular activity. Beneke’s terminology is here somewhat confusing, as he speaks of these activities as being unitary, while still corresponding to multiplicity of faculties, for instance, sensory activity being instantiated by five sensory faculties of touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision. More important than this terminological muddle is Beneke’s remark that it is quite impossible to separate any body and soul within these activities - for instance, we do not have a separate soul using body to receive sensations, but in sensations, and indeed, in all human life, mental and physical aspects are completely intertwined.

Beneke also says that traditionally different senses have been divided into subjective and objective kinds. He opposes this division, because human life does not neatly divide into subjective and objective components - each human being is a subjective individual, but also shares features with other human beings and is in this sense objective. He does admit some gradual difference in the subjectivity and objectivity of senses: smell, taste and touch deal with sensations that are more individual than sounds and visions.

Beneke’s main thesis is that no new faculties are required for explaining human mental life. In one sense this is just a piece of propaganda against previous philosophers: when a Wolffian mentions e.g. a faculty of memory, he is just saying in a curt fashion that humans can, among other things, remember things, but he is not insisting upon any distinct activity of memorising (in fact, many Wolffians wanted to explain these “faculties" or capacities through a single activity).

In another sense, Beneke’s suggestion fails at a deeper level. An important part in Beneke’s reconstruction of mental phenomena is to note that humans can reawaken former, already weakened perceptual activities - this is the foundation of memory and conceptual activities. One might firstly remark that this act of reawakening of perceptual activities - say, imagining a face of an absent person - is an activity quite different from perceiving the face of a present person, because one can clearly imagine things without at the same time perceiving them. It is as if Beneke has confused the similarity of the experiences of perceived and imagined face with the identity of activities behind them. Secondly, even these experiences are clearly of different nature, as was noted already by Hume: perceptions are livelier than imaginations.

With the assumption of reawakening of activities, it is easy for Beneke to reconstruct more complex cognitive activities. Indeed, for Beneke concepts - or conceptual activities, as he prefers - just are activities composed of simple, reawakened activities. For example, concept of flower, in a particular human being, is just the sum of memories of all flowers she has perceived. These concepts might then be connected with muscular activities of tongue etc., thus leading to invention of language.

It is clear that such psychologically understood concepts are very idiosyncratic, because humans might connect very different memories to same word. Indeed, he insists, individual perceptions of same thing are more alike in different persons than their concepts of these things. Concepts might be more universal than perceptions in the sense that many perceptions can awaken same conceptual activities in us, but this doesn’t make these conceptual activities any more necessary.

Despite the idiosyncrasy of concepts, Beneke does not want to say that they would be subjective in comparison with objective perceptions. Beneke is trying to point out that notions like subjectivity and objectivity are a matter of degree. He suggests this as an essential correction of the Kantian idea that space is subjective. This is true of all we experience, Beneke states, but space is still more objective than some other experiences, because it is experienced in a similar manner by all humans.

While conceptual activities are for Beneke unified complexes of activities, judgements are, on the other hand, comparisons of conceptual activities: e.g. in a positive judgement, one notes that a concept is similar to another, in whole or partially. For instance, judgements “this rose is red" means that a conceptual activity of thinking this rose is a part of the conceptual activity of thinking all red things one has perceived. Judgements are then certain, if the concepts involved are clear. Deductions are finally formed of chains of such comparisons of clear concepts.

A clear problem in this rather naive conception of certainty is the problem of induction. How can one be certain that all ravens are black, if one hasn’t perceived all ravens? Beneke’s solution is just to embrace the problem: certain universal judgements require infinity of perceptions. Then again, he admits, there are different grades of certainty, and the more we see perceptions verifying a universal judgement, the more certain the judgement is.

The difference of empirically and a priori certain judgements - and therefore of empirical and a priori sciences - is then only relative and lies in the ease, in which we can find instances verifying them: for a priori certain judgements, all experiences of certain sort provide positive instances. Thus, certainty of mathematics (apparently just geometry) is based on structure of human vision, while certainty of logic is based on structure of human conceptual activities.

As simple as Beneke’s solution of the problem of induction is his solution of Humean problem of causality. In fact, it is for Beneke just one modification of the first problem. A causal judgement, he says, just indicates that one of type of perception always follows another type of perception, and certainty of such a judgement is verified in the same manner as of every other universal judgement. In case of the general principle of causality - every event has its cause - the certainty is based on the very nature of human perception to consist of a series of interconnected events.

As a priori sciences Beneke mentions also aesthetics and ethics, which have to do with feelings or moods. A kind of starting point for Beneke’s account of feelings is provided by the traditional idea of four temperaments. Especially important are the elements out of which Beneke reconstructs the temperaments. These are the complementary aspects of receptivity for external stimuli and force of maintaining inner activity. Both aspects can be stronger or weaker, creating thus four different combinations or temperaments.

The two components of external stimuli and use of inner force are, according to Beneke, also components of feelings, together with basic activities and their combinations or concepts. While there are innumerably many manners to combine different quantities of stimuli and inner force, Beneke underlines three limit cases, corresponding to important aesthetical concepts: state of heightened external stimuli is an experience of pleasurable, state of heightened inner force is an experience of sublimity, and finally, state of balance between stimuli and inner force is an experience of beauty.

Beneke explains these three notions in detail only in relation to basic activities, but these examples suffice. All nourishing activities and lower sensory faculties (smell, taste and touch) are too fleeting to be capable of anything else but the feeling of pleasure, but with other basic activities, Beneke says, all three feelings are present. Thus, quick sounds, variety of irregular shapes and rocking movement are all pleasurable, long sounds, lack of shapes and storm are all sublime, and harmonious sounds, regular shapes and rocking of boat in storm are beautiful.

Kant had famously noted that pleasure wasn’t a topic of what we would call an aesthetical study. In a sense, Beneke concurs, because external stimuli causing pleasures are again very idiosyncratic and therefore mostly incapable of generalisation. Then again, inner force is supposedly something similar from one person to another, which makes sublimity capable of generalisation. Like in other cases, beauty lies also here between pleasure and sublimity, which Beneke uses to account for Kantian idea that judgements of beauty are in a sense both subjective and at least demand universalisation. Now, while Kant had not indicated that a feeling of sublimity would be fully generalisable, he had compared completely idiosyncratic pleasure and subjective, but universality demanding beauty with the objective and fully universal demands of moral principles. In a sense, Beneke follows Kant by taking sublimity as a foundation of the final a priori science or morality.

Beneke’s account of morality is linked to his idea of desire and purposeful activity. Sometimes, he describes, a mental activity, while still active in some sense, points to a more full realisation of itself and thus comes with a yearning toward this fuller realisation - this is a state of desire. Desire as such does not suffice for fulfilling the yearning, and on occasion, desire remains without this actualisation as a mere desire. At other times, desire is fulfilled by an activity, which could then be called purposeful action. While the fulfilling activity can be called purposeful the desiring activity itself is not purposeful - for instance, while an artist creates a work of art through a purposeful activity, aiming to realise an internal idea of an artwork, this internal idea has not come about through any purposeful activity.

Now, human beings make judgements about other humans and their inner mental life through feelings the actions of others generate in them. According to Beneke, it is apparently the feeling of sublimity, from which we can recognise truly moral persons (Beneke thinks that it is especially the individuals and their virtues, which should be the topic of morality). In other words, the feeling of sublime gives an ideal of behaviour, with which to compare concrete human beings. It goes without saying that this ideal lies then not in susceptibility to external stimuli, but on the contrary, in independence from external stimuli.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Of the fourfold root of the law of sufficient reason

1788 - 1860

With Arthur Schopenhauer I faced an important decision on my blogs. Without a shadow of a doubt, Schopenhauer's philosophy belongs to post-Kantian period known as German idealism. Despite his vitriolic rhetorics against them, Schopenhauer has much more in common with German idealists than he cared to admit. World of experience as a mere phenomenon, will or activity as the true reality behind it, art as a pathway to understanding world of experience and partially even the ultimate reality – all of these primary foundations of Schopenhauer's philosophy are themes discussed by some German idealists. Even Schopenhauer's interest in Indian philosophy was nothing unusual for the age.

Despite all the similarities, I simply had to include Schopenhauer as the part of this blog, detailing the development of modern philosophy, because of one crucial element in his philosophy, namely, his pessimism. It is debatable how original even that sentiment was – although the public image of the classic German systems was one of progress, they still showed an inkling of the angst and suffering involved in the human condition. Still, pessimism as expressed by the figure of Schopenhauer was an important instigator for much German philosophy of the late 19th century and beyond, because it forcefully raised the question of the meaning of life to public discussion.

Schopenhauer's first serious philosophical work, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, contains already in nuce many of the important elements of his later work on world as both representation and will. Yet, it seemingly considers a very specific question: the famous proposition, supposedly invented by Leibniz, that all things must have a reason. Even in this work Schopenhauer shows his talent of ridiculing the ideas of his predecessors, often even for no reason. Schopenhauer's main task is to note that while the principle of sufficient reason is correct, it should also be divided into several subprinciples, because the principle as such is quite too abstract to help anyone. This supposed innovation is not that original, because even many pre-Kantian philosophers had criticised Leibniz and his supposed lackey, Christian Wolff, for not noticing that the principle of sufficient reason was actually just an abstraction out of many different principles. Remarkably, even Wolff himself had said that reasons came in many different forms – Schopenhauer himself knows this, but insinuates that Wolff had just managed to make a muddle in his attempt to classify different kinds of reasons.

Even if Schopenhauer was quite willing to make fun of Wolff and companions, he was also happy to just steal their terminology, whenever needed. Thus, Schopenhauer borrows from Wolff the notion of ratio essendi – reason for the existence of something – but changes the meaning of the term, because he is not satisfied with what Wolff meant by it. For Wolff, the actual existence of things is eventually based on God's free decision, while the possible existence of a thing – what something is or would be, if it existed – depends on its essence, which is supposedly a kind of kernel of thing's properties.

As we shall see, Schopenhauer doesn't believe that anything truly new would ever be generated, but he does appear to accept that things in the world around us do have a sort of abstract essence. Yet, unlike with Wolff, this essence is not a conglomeration of basic forces, but instead, the sum of all spatiotemporal properties of a thing. Here Schopenhauer shows his enthusiasm for Kant's idea of space and time as forms of sensation. Primary one of these two appears to be time, where a series of temporal points determines the next one in a very simple manner: if we have four temporal points, they will be followed by a fifth. Schopenhauer is here following the supposedly Kantian idea that arithmetic is somehow determined by time. Just like with time, spatial elements determine one another. The difference is, firstly, that the three-dimensionality of space allows more complex relations, and secondly, that these determining relations are often reciprocal – any two angles of a triangle determine the third angle.

One might ask why Schopenhauer didn't distinguish the temporal and spatial grounding relations, which are clearly dissimilar. His classification seems even more arbitrary, when we look at the next species of grounding relation. When we do not regard merely space or time, but their filled combination – world of experience – we find, Schopenhauer insists, that all spatio-temporal events require a cause that temporally precedes them. This sort of ground or reason Schopenhauer calls, again following Wolff, ratio fiendi, that is, a reason for a change. Note that it is only a reason for change Schopenhauer is here talking about, and since every change presupposes something that remains same, he is confident to draw the conclusion that we can assume the existence of something (matter) that remains same throughout all changes. Since all changes require a previous cause, the series of causes goes on to infinite past, Schopenhauer insists. One might wonder how Schopenhauer argues for these statements, but in a sense, he does not – these truths are just self-evidently true, because they characterise the world we experience, which is just a world as we experience it and not as it is in itself.

Although Schopenhauer then seems to take all kinds of causes as belonging to one class, he does distinguish causes in the living world as different from all the rest of the causes. While a mere cause determines necessarily what its effect will be, a cause acting on, say, a plant, will be a mere stimulus for the plant's own life processes. Even more distinct are such causes in the animal world, which do not merely start a reflex, but make the animal motivated to act in some manner. Peculiarly, while Schopenhauer does not want to make stimuli into a distinct group of grounds or reasons, he does make motives into an independent class. His justification is that we humans experience motives in a different manner from other causes – when we want or desire something, we are conscious of ourselves as an active agent wanting or desiring something. One might ask Schopenhauer if we do not also have a peculiar experience of stimuli causing reflexes. For instance, when the doctor hits our knee, we feel our leg moving and this feeling clearly differs from us seeing a rock fall – yet, we also feel the movement as not being instigated by ourselves or as involuntary.

Whatever the potential faults in Schopenhauer's classification are, we have dealt now with three of his four types of sufficient reason. While these three types concern three different kinds of objects – abstract spatio-temporal figures, concrete physical objects and ourselves as acting agents – the fourth type is more about representations of objects. This is in Schopenhauer's eyes the peculiarly human type of reason, and indeed, concerns our ability of reasoning. To put it shortly, this type is about the question what we can hold as true. The short answer is, of course, that we should have a reason for this. These reasons could be other truths, but here an infinite regress is not possible, Schopenhauer says. Instead, there must be a link to objects of our experiences or at least to the general formal properties characteristing the whole experience.

Maine de Biran: Essay on the fundaments of psychology (1812?)

When I last time considered the philosophy of Maine de Biran, we saw him follow in the footsteps of a tradition of Condillac and Cabanis, when he tried to describe different capacities of human mind considering also the viewpoint of physiology.

In Essai sure le fondements de la psychologie, not published in his life time, Maine de Biran adds to this sensualist tradition of philosophy also considerations of the traditional Cartesian and Leibnizian metaphysics, and what is even more striking, of Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Maine de Biran groups all of these philosophers together as dealing with mere abstractions, instead of the concrete embodied mind, like in the Condillacian tradition – worst example in his eyes is Schelling's philosophy of identity, which tries to start from the notion of existence common to both physical nature and human mind. Yet, he is also quick to point out that the philosophers of abstraction have some interesting contributions to the discussion of the capacities of human mind.

One particular discovery of Kantians Maine de Biran mentions is the remark that Lockean ideas or sensations are not as simple as they appear to be, but consist of two components. One is the affection as such, the mere feeling or mood that we just passively receive in sensations (say, that something greenish in front of us). The other component is the appropriation of this feeling as belonging to me. It is just this act which turns mere feeling into a proper sensation, Maine de Biran says. Human sensation is for him, then, born of two different things. Even Descartes had an inkling of this duality in human experience, when he separated physical nature from human soul – still, Descartes made a mistake in substantialising these two different fields of experience.

But the true innovation in Maine be Biran's eyes is to be found in the Fichtean notion of I and its contrast to not-I. He is not satisfied with mere naming of these concepts, but also notes that the source of this separation lies in human striving and resistance of the environment against this striving. Because of these two elements, we regard some affections a belonging to our body – those we can change easily – while others we view as belonging to space outside us – those that we cannot change so easily. Again, this is a very Fichtean notion, although Maine de Biran tries to give this idea a more physiological twist by situating the striving in human brain.

The hierarchy of different capacities of human mind follows more or less closely Maine de Biran's work on habit, although here it is perhaps a bit clearer that the capacities are arranged according to the level of control the active side of human mind has over the passive side. Thus, perceptions differ from mere sensations, says Maine de Biran, because in perceiving we actively put our attention to some facets of what we sense. This capacity of attending is then basis for various other capacities like making comparisons and making generalisations based on similarities.

The highest state of human capacities for Maine de Biran is then the capacity of reflection. This involves, firstly, capacity of making deductions, which is for Maine de Biran essentially a capacity based on memory – the individual steps of deductions should be immediately convincing and memory just assures us that we have considered all the steps in the process (notice how psychological Maine de Biran's notion of deduction is – there's no consideration of cases where a machine would have made the necessary deductive moves, but we humans couldn't verify the truth of these moves, because the proof would be too long for humans to comprehend).

It is quite clear that such deductions alone cannot furnish any truths, unless some truth would have been given before deductions. Here Maine de Biran faces the very Kantian question of synthetic a priori judgements, and his answers are also quite similar as with the followers of Kant. Maine de Biran suggests that we have some basic experiences, which can be taken as such basis for deductions. For instance, we have a fundamental experience of some resistance, and even more, of resistance situated in space. Geometrical axioms are then mere abstractions from this original intuition.

In addition to mathematics, Maine de Biran accepts the existence of such fundamental experience in metaphysics or psychology. If mathematics is based on our primal experience of what is not me, metaphysics, on the other hand, is based on our primal experience of ourselves – we have the ability to recognise ourselves as existing, which Fichte expressed with the formula I = I. Maine de Biran is quick to point out that we cannot use this primal experience in Cartesian manner to deduce that we would be some sort of ”thinking substances” - following Kant's criticism of paralogisms, Maine de Biran suggests that this would involve confusing our experience of ourselves (thinking) with us as we are in ourselves. Indeed, we are not just thinkers, Maine de Biran says, but essentially also active doers, and we wouldn't know ourselves as ourselves without our active striving.

The main thing one can base on this primal experience of ourselves as active agents, according to Maine de Biran is what Kant would have called categories. We are unified agents and in a sense stable elements of our experience – through abstraction, we can then get such categories like unity or substance. What is especially important is Maine de Biran's idea that we draw the notion of causality from our own acting – we think other things as causes, because we first experience ourselves as active agents and then draw analogies from our own case. Similarly, the account of modalities is generated from our original experience that some things we can freely decide, while others are necessarily decided by other things.

Maine de Biran's work presents then an interesting take on Kantian philosophy. It would undoubtedly not satisfy purist, formalist Kantians, who want to keep Kant completely removed from psychological and anatomical considerations. From a more extensive perspective, Maine de Biran offers a refreshing take on a too familiar philosopher.

Pierre Jean George Cabanis: On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of man (1802)

1757-1808

Even during the tumults of French Revolution, the French philosophical and scientific culture was thriving, as we’ve seen a while ago with Volney and Condorcet. This time I’ll take a look at a friend of Condorcet, Cabanis, and his seminal work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme.

Although the title of the book might suggest a work on ethics, this is far from the case. Instead, morals mentioned mean simply the mores or habits of a human person. In other words, Cabanis is investigating the question, how the two sides of a human being, traditionally marked by the names “body” and “soul”, relate to one another.

In principle, Cabanis has an easy solution – he is a straightforward materialist, and what had been called soul, or the kernel of human behavior, is nothing else but brain. Then again, there are interesting nuances in the materialism of Cabanis. Firstly, Cabanis appears to be a sort of an emergentist. Physical laws reveal one layer of the world, but they cannot by themselves explain the more complex chemical laws, and even more complexity arises on the biological level.

Even if Cabanis appears to deny that the regularities of the more complex level could be reduced to those of a simpler level, he does admit there are certain analogies running throughout the whole system of nature. One might say that there is a certain centralizing tendency, starting from the gravitational forces working between large bodies. Similar centralizing tendency can be seen in chemical combinations, Cabanis adds, but again, with complexities that were not apparent on the lower level. Chemical combinations are elective in the sense that a substance shows more inclination to combine with one reagent than another. Cabanis goes even so far as to suggest that this elective affinity is the first sign of will in nature.

The centralizing tendency gets even more apparent with biological entities, which form clear organic units, in which individual organs interact with one another. The highest pinnacle of this development is an animal organism, in which sensibility is added to life. This sensibility, Cabanis notes, is not restricted to just brains, although it is its center, but can be detected throughout the whole nervous system as an ability to receive affections and react to them.

An interesting aspect in this view of animal organism is the emphasis on the organic unity. Thus, Cabanis criticizes Condillac’s thought experiment of a statue, which receives one sensitive power after another, beginning from smell and going finally through all different senses. Cabanis notes that one cannot really isolate individual senses, because they work in so close co-operation with one another and with the whole organism.

Another interesting aspect is Cabanis’s discussion of the development of moi, or self. He notes that a newborn baby is not a complete tabula rasa. Firstly, it has surely managed to receive certain sensations even in the womb, of course of its own internal condition, but also of the world outside, through voices vibrating to its ears. Although these sensations must have been quite muddled and soon their memories are overcome by more vivid sensations, they have been there. Secondly, the newborn also comes with some instincts, probably caused by the centralizing tendency. Thus, a baby is already bent on conserving itself and feeding itself with nourishment given to it. Especially interesting is one of these instincts, namely, the instinct to move. Through moving the body, the brain becomes volitional and gets a sense of its own self.

Even though it has a will of its own, brain is still affected by the body around it and its constitution – change the muscular structure a bit and it becomes more difficult for the brain to move itself around. The effects of the constitution to the brain form different personality types – a baggage, which Cabanis inherits from traditional medicine and only slightly alters by adding two further unnamed types to the traditional four (melancholic, sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic).

Cabanis goes so far in insisting on correspondence between bodily constitution and personality that he of necessity must also find a clear difference between male and female personalities. His descriptions of women as frivolous creatures with no patience to conduct proper scientific studies sound more like cultural roles extended without any justification to the whole humanity. At least Cabanis is willing to admit that not all women fall under the stereotype – that is, if they have a rare physical constitution.

Cabanis does not fortunately state that the rare constitution of manly women would be an illness. He does acknowledge that real diseases can, through affecting body, affect also personality. Indeed, all effects of the environment can have an effect on our constitution and personality, especially those that come through senses – for instance, a certain odour might invigorate us. Particularly forceful effects are caused by climate, which we are in contact with daily. In a somewhat Lamarckian fashion, Cabanis thinks that all these effects can be inherited by the next generation. And because climate will have the same effect on the next generation, this will eventually lead to clear differences between various types of same species in different continents – thus Cabanis explains also the supposed racial differences in human species.

Although the majority of the book is dedicated to the influence of external surroundings to personality or brain, Cabanis does admit that the causality can go the other way also – after all, brain is a part of the material world and can affect it on its part. This suggests to Cabanis the possibility of affecting one’s own constitution and hence also one’s personality. Although this is no true book on ethics, some phrases indicate, to which direction Cabanis wished to develop humankind – to a vigorous harmony, in which all capacities of human personality are used to their utmost.

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.