Abstract
Philosophy begins, as the ancient philosophers reminded those who had become too caught up in technicalities and the secondary joys of polemic, with astonishment; and it should remain bathed in a nimbus of astonishment, if it is to continue to be philosophy. And yet astonishment is not enough. It is often vulnerably expressed: it seems either to state the obvious rather badly; or worse, to move at the double from the valid but obvious to the non-obvious and invalid. In this essay, I want to reflect on some of the intuitions most commonly served up by my own, perhaps rather peculiar, astonishment and try to unpack from those intuitions some non-obvious but valid conclusions that may be of relevance to some present-day disputes about the place of subjectivity in the objective world and the relations of priority between language and extra-linguistic reality, though I shall scarcely touch explicitly upon either of these huge issues here. My aim will be a modest one: to put into italics some large facts - too large, really, to be called facts but I know of no better word - about us. What follows will not be an argument in the usual manner of a philosophical essay but a meditation; or, to put it less charitably, a circling round a large truth or large realisation that defies expression.
The thing I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.
Traditional
Yet, in every possible case, being, you will agree, is still strange. To be in some particular way is stranger still. It’s even embarrassing.
Dialogue: A New Fragment Concerning M. Teste,
In: M. Teste, translated by Jackson Matthews
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 64)
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Notes and references
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (English translation Robert Baldick, London: Penguin, 1965): I see my hand spread out on the table. It is alive – it is me. It opens, the fingers unfold and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat underbelly. It looks like an animal upside down. The fingers are the paws … it is me, those two animals moving about at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of another paw; I can feel its weight on the table which isn’t me… (pp. 143–4)
The phenomenoIogical/Heideggerian/existentialist provenance of much of the present essay will be evident to anyone familiar with the relevant literature: it is more pervasive than the acknowledged references. However, it is equally rooted in the analytical and linguistic tradition. I hope it will, in a sense, move between both, in the way suggested by ‘The Philosophies of Consciousness and the the Philosophies of the Concept, Or: Is There Any Point in Studying the Headache I have Now?’ in Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: a critique of Contemporary Pessimism (London: Macmillan, 1997).
R.M. Rilke, The Notebooks ofMalte Laurid Brigge (English translation by John Linton, London: Hogarth, 1930).
See, for example, The Phenomenology of Perception (English translation by Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Of course, it is easy to exaggerate the naivety of Descartes’ dualism. Descartes emphasised that he was not lodged in his body Tike a pilot in a vessel’.
Assuming it was presented to me in adequate light and I had not recently ‘changed out of all recognition’.
This relationship between body and viewpoint is lucidly expressed in P.P. Strawson’s Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959): We may summarise such facts by saying that for each person, there is one body which occupies a certain causal position in relation to that person’s perceptual experience, a causal position which in various ways is unique in relation to each of the various kinds of perceptual experience he has; and – as a further consequence – that this body is also unique for him as an object of the various kinds of perceptual experience which he has. (p. 92) The entire chapter (‘Persons’), from which this passage is abstracted, is a wonderfully suggestive exploration of a variety of mysteries that touch upon our present concerns. For example, why should the different dependencies of perception – in the case of vision, eyes open and closed, orientation of head, and location – refer to the same body? And why are one’s states of consciousness, including perceptions, ascribed to anything (any body) at all? Why are they ascribed to the very same thing as certain corporeal characteristics located in a certain physical situation?
Of course, there are conditions in which I fail to recognise parts of my body. For example, certain stroke patients with lesions of the parietal lobe may not regard an affected limb as their own and may even develop a hatred towards it (‘misoplegia’) and attempt to throw it out of bed. (I had once such patient who christened his right arm ‘Thatcher’.) And auto-prosopagnosia – the failure to recognise one’s own face – has also been described with certain lesions.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having (English translation unattribute, London and Glasgow: Fontana Library, 1965). See especially ‘A Metaphysical Diary’ pp. 91 et seq and ‘Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having’.
T.L.S. Sprigge, ‘Final Causes’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume (1971), pp. 149–70. One of the relevant passages in this seminal paper is worth quoting verbatim: One is wondering about the consciousness which an object possesses whenever one wonders what it must be like being that object. Concerning an object deemed non-conscious one cannot thus wonder. To wonder what it is like being an object is to concern oneself with a question different from any scientific or practical question about the observable properties or behaviour of that object or about the mechanisms which underlie such properties or behaviour. (p. 167) This intuition – that the essential condition of consciousness is that there must be ‘something it is like to be’ the object in question – has been the basic of one of the most powerful arguments against materialist (or objectivist) accounts of consciousness and/or mind. It had its most famous expression in Thomas Nagel’s paper. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435–50). (Nagel generously acknowledges Sprigge’s independent and prior discovery in The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 p. 15). Nagel’s argument against an objectivist (or materialist) theory of mind was that, however much we learned about the nervous system of a bat, we should still not know what it was like to be a bat. This argument has been taken up by many philosophers since, notably Frank Jackson and Howard Robinson, who have suggested thought-experiments to bring out the essential point of this argument; for example, imagining a blind 23rd-century superscientist who knew all there was about the physiology of vision. The latter would still not know what it was like to see, what the experience of light was like. The discussion of Nagel’s paper subsequently became rather muddled when Tye, and others, argued that what the blind superscientist was deprived of was not additional (objective) knowledge – so the materialist account of the world was, after all, complete. This, however, was to argue past Nagel’s point: objective knowledge always falls short of subjective awareness of ‘what it is like to be’ a bat, or whatever. It is not additional (objective) facts that are required to bridge the gap between the materialist world-picture and the subjective viewpoint. The being of a material object is captured in objective and exhaustive knowledge of its properties; this is not true of the being of a human being.
The Nagel-Jackson-Tye arguments are discussed in Raymond Tallis, ‘A Critique of Tye’s The Subjective Qualities of Experience’, Philosophical Investigations, 12 (3) (1989), 217–22;
and Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 149–55. I argue that Tye and others had missed the point of Nagel’s argument; but I also wonder whether Nagel himself did also to some extent. 9. Most of what we are is unchosen by us; this is the background of ‘facticity’ (to use Sartre’s term) against which we make our choices and choose ‘what to be’. We are obliged to live out a body with certain properties, limitations and parameters; to be a person who has – or has to reject – this cultural heritage; to be a child born of this family, located in such and such a place in society. And yet this facticity is not purely contingent in the sense of being accidents ‘about’ me. When I bang my shin, it is no mere accident that it is I who suffer this pain. It has, and feels to have, a deep necessity. In short, there is an acquired necessity: once I am, I am this thing (denned in terms of the inescapables)and the things that happen to this thing are quasi-necessary.
Hazel Barnes succinctly defines facticity in the key to Sartre’s terminology appended to her excellent translation of Being and Nothingness: an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Methuen, 1957): The For-Itself’s necessary connection with the In-itself, hence with the world and its own past. It is what allows us to say that the For-Itself is or exists. The facticity of freedom is the fact that freedom is not able not to be free.
The post-Hegelian conceptualisation of a consciousness, or a conscious being, as ‘a for-itself is particularly associated with the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. Sartre contrasted unconscious Being (‘Being-in-itself’) with conscious being (‘Being-for-itself’). These terms correspond roughly to Hegel’s an-sich and fur-sich. There was a third category, also derived from Hegel’s sense of the essential human being coming to himself through acknowledgement by others: ‘being-for-others’.
The fundamental question triggered by the formula cogito ergo sum is not whether it is a necessary truth – in other words, whether it can be accepted without question – but what it is a truth of or about. Whether, ultimately, it is true about something or nothing; whether it is true as a tautology, in which case empty; or whether it makes a substantive point. Another reading of it is as a demonstration or – like Moore’s famous proof of the existence of external reality to be executed by raising first one hand and then another – merely a recipe for a demonstration of a truism.
It is difficult to speak of ‘it’ with reference to the non-existent. All one has is a phrase ‘the non-existent’ which has sense but, by definition, no reference. At best its reference is to a class or category – a curiously empty category, the category of emptiness. I am reminded of the discussion that followed the recent Church of England pronouncement that Hell did not exist as a positive state: Hell, rather, was simply ‘total annihilation of being’. According to the Dean of Lichfield Cathedral, this was no soft option for sinners since it meant ‘being distant from, or having one’s back turned on the love of God’. In other words, suffering would come not from positive assaults but from the privative torture of losing out on the joy of union with God. This is, of course, absurd. If one does not exist, one cannot have one’s back turned on anything and one cannot be far from Him, any more than one can be near to Him. Nor can one suffer a state of privation – or any state, positive or negative. Indeed – and this is the relevant point here – once one is annihilated one does not have a particular portion of nothingness to call one’s own, to call oneself. There is no such thing as my non-being. There may be his non-being which exists only for others. If nothingness has labelled quarters, sectors or spots that correspond to particular non-beings, they exist only in third-person discourse, not in reality. There is in extra-linguistic reality nothing corresponding to my non-being, your non-being, the non-being of a dead cat, the non-being of Atlantis, the non-being of a unicorn, etc. Non-being, in short, is not tacked down to owners, or to extra-linguistic referents that are also possessors of nothingness. There is nothing, and there never will be, something corresponding to ‘my non-being’. Nor – pace the Dean of Lichfield – is non-being a state suffered by anyone. When I die, I shall not change from being a particular someone to being a particular no one. The nothing that I shall revert to will not have my label on it: I won’t be a particular nothing, but dissolve without residue into the Not that exists only as a general limit to what is.
My astonishment that I exist connects with another astonishment – that I am this (rather than something else) – as follows. This second astonishment is based on my knowing, or knowing of, beings other than myself -other people, other non-human existents. Some of those other beings are beings that existed in the past and are no longer. That I might not be this [being] is linked with the intuition that I might not have been at all via beings that once existed and are no longer. I shall return to this in the main text.
Roland Barthes, The Elements of Semiology (translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, London: Cape, 1967), p. 22.
This may immediately suggest another reason for damping down astonishment at my existing: if I did not exist, then ‘I’ would lack any referent (in my mouth) – it would, by definition, be unuttered by me; or it would lack the referent necessary to sustain my astonishment at my existence. My existence is necessary for any expression of astonishment at my existence to have meaning, to count as a valid proposition, expression or speech act. (These three are, importantly, not the same.) This point has been made by linguists who, while they distinguish between correct and successful reference, believe that this distinction cannot be maintained in the case of personal pronouns such as ‘I’. For example, John Lyons, in his profound and illuminating chapter on ‘Deixis, Space and Time’, in Semantics, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1977): the distinction between correct and successful reference … cannot seriously be drawn in relation to first-person pronouns. The speaker will correctly and successfully refer to himself by means of the pronoun ‘I’ in English under normal conditions (i.e. in situations other than those in which he acts as an interpreter or spokesman for somebody else) only if he is performing a particular deictic role. It is his performance of this role, and not the truth of any presupposed identifying proposition which determines the correct reference of ‘I’. (p. 645)
Lyons, ibid., p. 643. If we go all the way and consider the referent of ‘I’ to be the speaker of the token ‘I’ at the moment of uttering that token, ‘I’ is in danger of becoming a self-reflexive token as follows: a) ‘I’ refers to the speaker at the moment of uttering the token ‘I’; b) that part of the speaker at the moment of uttering ‘I’ that is relevant to determining the referent of ‘I’ does not include all (or, necessarily, any part or, of his body). The relevant part of the speaker-moment is the act of emission of the token. c) The act of emission of the utterance-token has many elements that are irrelevant to its meaning and the utterance-token itself has many physical features that are irrelevant to its meaning. d) When all these irrelevant features are stripped off, we are left with a pure token-emission which, essentially, is inseparable from the assumption of a place in a grammatical sequence. e) Under such an interpretation, ‘I’ refers to this assumption of a place in the grammatical sequence. By this means, the existential self-reflexivity of ‘I’ drifts to token-reflexivity. This, I suspect, is how post-Saussurean thinkers eliminate the extra-linguistic context even from discourse, from utterances, that achieve reference deictically. However, the performative nature of speech-acts, and of the use of ‘I’ (as set out by Lyons above) forbids this last step. As Lyons points out, ‘Deixis, in general, sets limits upon the possibility of decontextualisation; and person-deixis … introduces an ineradicable subjectivity into the semantic structure of natural languages’ (ibid., p. 646). Two minutes’ reflection upon this would have saved the intellectual community many person-centuries of barking up the wrong Sequoia under the leadership of Jacques Derrida and his followers.
The steps by which post-Saussurean writers such as Benveniste make the ‘I’ purely intra-linguistic (as part of a their general programme of trying to demonstrate that language ‘speaks us’ (as opposed to our speaking language) and that its referent is itself are critically analysed in Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism (Edward Arnold: London, 1988),
Chapter 5, ‘Realism and the Subject’; and Enemies of Hope (London: Macmillan, 1997), Chapter 8, ‘The Linguistic Unconscious: Saussure and the Post-Saussureans’.
This is perhaps to adopt too uncritically J.S. Mills’ view that proper names do not have senses, that they are meaningless marks that have denotation without connotation. John Searle (in Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, 1969) has criticised this position forcefully. In Section 7.2 ‘Proper Names’, he convincingly argues that not even proper names permit reference entirely without predication – ‘for to do so would be to violate the principle of identification, without conformity to which we cannot refer at all’ (p. 174). Nevertheless, the reference of such names is only thinly buttered with sense.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part 4, ‘Of Personal Identity’.
As Sprigge (op. cit.) noted: ‘Actually, there are also very great difficulties in imagining what it is like being oneself.’
I am not entirely sure of that. When I am deeply asleep or profoundly comatose I am unaware of my body as such (though in sleep it may assert itself indirectly through its influence on my dreams).
This not-quite-possessive relation to one’s body is explored by Marcel. The following passage (Marcel, op. cit., p. 91) is very much to the point: it seems to me that corporeity … is involved in having – just as corporeity implies what we may call historicity. A body is a history, or more accurately it is the outcome, the fixation of a history. I cannot therefore say that I have a body, at least not properly speaking, but the mysterious relation uniting me to my body is at the foundation of all my powers of having.
And we shall encounter the difficulty of reconciling the feeling of a unitary, unbroken ‘I’ – the ‘I’ as a non-composite simple – with the fact that I am distributed over, associated with, deposited in, responsible for, various parts of my body, over situations, preoccupations, duties, sensations, feelings, etc. Kant solved this by postulating a cognitive subject which was an active unitary consciousness known, not by introspection or observation, but by a ‘transcendental’ deduction. As Peter Rickman has put it, ‘there is knowledge and this is a necessary condition of its possibility’ (‘From Hermeneutics to Deconstruction: the Epistemology of Interpretation’, International Studies in Philosophy, XXVII: 2). The problem, however, is that of relating this unitary subject to the actual person, to the apparent seat of particular needs, impulses, sensations, projects, feelings, etc. and to the influence upon him or her of physiological, psychological, social and historical factors. This has preoccupied many post-Kantian thinkers, as Rickman points out: This concept [the transcendental cognitive subject] has been attacked and challenged by major thinkers throughout the 19th century because of the supposed scandal that this cognitive subject should not be confused or identified with the empirical subject, the flesh and blood human being who – obviously related to the cognitive subject – acquires knowledge. Kierkegaard emphasized the intertwining of man’s intellectual emotional and volitional life, Marx and his followers insisted that man’s thinking is rooted in his practical activity of shaping his environment by work within social organizations. Nietzsche stressed that man was an animal whose instincts colored even his highest thought processes. Dilthey complained – as he looked at the history of epistemology culminating in Kant – that ‘no blood flowed in the veins of the cognitive subject’, (p. 77)
Evolutionists and biologists of consciousness (criticised in my The Explicit Animal (London: Macmillan, 1991) and in Chapter 1 of the present volume) live inside this tautology. The assumptions that we get the world wrong at our peril, that the imperatives of survival demand that we tap into how things really are, that the forces of selection will have shaped living organisms into devices for revealing the truth about natural reality have more flaws than is pleasant to tease out. Suffice it to say that there is no evolutionary reason: a) why there should be consciousness at all; b) nor, consequently, why there should be a category of explicit truth; nor c) why the organism could not live in a state of adaptive falsehood or inhabit a world where objects, including organisms, are, as in Kant, to some extent the internal accusatives of consciousness.
To put this another way: consciousness of being an x is not simply an uncovering of a pre-existing x, of x ‘coming to itself’.
I owe this formulation to Frederick Olafson, ‘The Unity of Heidegger’s Thought’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 100.
This is discussed in Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: a Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 383–5.
Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others (translated by Michael Schmidt, London: Paladin, 1992), p. 171.
It is discussed in Raymond Tallis, Newton’s Sleep (London: Macmillan, 1995).
For a discussion of this tension, see Raymond Tallis, ‘Metaphysics and Gossip: Notes Towards a Manifesto for a Novel of the Future’, in Theorrhoea and After (London: Macmillan, 1999).
H.J. Blackham, ‘Gabriel Marcel’, Six Existentialist Thinkers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 67.
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Tallis, R. (1999). (That) I Am This (Thing): Reflections on Deixis, Explicitness and the Tautology of the Self. In: On the Edge of Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598867_4
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