NDPR Brian Ellis, The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-07-02 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Brian Ellis, The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism, Acumen, 2009, 179pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781844652068.

Reviewed by Anjan Chakravartty, University of Toronto

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The notion of a "first philosophy" -- a maximally general theory concerning what exists most fundamentally, which thereby properly constrains all other forms of theorizing about the nature of the world -- is one of the grandest aspirations of systematic philosophy. Brian Ellis believes that an adequately developed metaphysics of scientific realism would constitute such a theory (1, 115), and The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism is his attempt to furnish the development that would make it so. This is an ambitious project, fraught with considerable challenges. It is a matter of ongoing debate, for example, how scientific realism might best be construed. And whatever one's considered view of realism, it is not at all clear what "the metaphysics" of this position should be. Finally, it is to ask much of the account of natural kinds, laws, properties, causation, and quantum mechanics that Ellis presents, that it succeed in achieving such a lofty goal. In the following, I consider his gallant efforts in the face of these difficulties.

One might think that scientific knowledge furnishes a plausible constraint on theorizing about the nature of reality. After all, the modern sciences are commonly ceded an elevated status among means of investigating the world. This is not an uncontroversial view among philosophers, but let it stand for the sake of argument. To accept this view is still a long way from accepting that scientific realism should have the same status, let alone the metaphysics of scientific realism. How does one get from science to the latter? One might construct an answer to this question on the basis of what Ellis says in chapter 1, where he considers the relationship between science and metaphysics. Ellis maintains that while 'science . . . can tell us what we ought rationally to believe on the basis of our observations and experiments . . . it cannot tell us what would make any belief of ours true in the required metaphysical sense' (10-11). The sense required is an ontological explanation of the truth of the relevant beliefs, supported by an overarching metaphysical theory whose explanations are typified by 'metaphysical necessitation': 'the relation that holds between things in the world and things that they make true' (19). Thus, it is the need for this sort of explanation that requires the move from science via realism to metaphysics, in order to identify truthmakers for scientific knowledge.

The need for ontological explanations of this sort, exemplifying metaphysical necessitation no less, is not universally accepted among philosophers of science, and Ellis does not defend this need in the face of alternative (for example, empiricist and pragmatist) approaches to scientific knowledge. The motivation for the project of the book must, therefore, be taken as preaching to the already converted. Australian realists, Ellis notes, demand a metaphysically robust conception of objective truth (17), and the metaphysics of scientific realism will provide one. The second chapter outlines the form that this metaphysics will take, and though some of the proposals to follow will prove more controversial than others, not all of them, it seems, are required to drive the explanatory ontology project envisioned. For example, Ellis prefers an "ontologically oriented" version of scientific realism, concerned with what exists, as opposed to semantically oriented versions preoccupied with truth and reference (23-4). Given the aim of identifying the truthmakers of scientific knowledge, this may seem a puzzling commitment, but nothing to follow hangs on it. Ellis suggests that the reliance in science on devices such as counterfactuals, counterlegals, and idealizations renders much of it non-referential and thus non-descriptive (26-30), but such a view rather overlooks much recent work on idealization in the philosophy of science.

In addition to introducing the ontology of scientific realism to be elaborated in the remainder of the book, chapter 2 also introduces a number of important assumptions. One assumption is that the primary aim of science is to explain; explanatory power is thus the most important desideratum in evaluating theories (25). This choice of the "primary aim" of science is one that is commonly extracted from a list of putatively primary aims (description, prediction, empirical adequacy, fame and fortune, etc.), and though it is unclear what moral certainty could inform any particular philosopher's choice as to what is primary, Ellis' selection resonates well with his ambition to extend explanation beyond that which even science can provide by means of metaphysics. The methodology of his enterprise is inference to the best explanation, and the test of a good metaphysical hypothesis is twofold: 'it must be consistent with the known facts, and be part of a unifying account of reality that explains the overall structure of what we are able to observe' (123). Importantly, however, Ellis also holds that 'the aim of ontology is to say what kinds of elements must be supposed to exist fundamentally . . . to say what kinds of things we really need for an ontological reduction of everything there is' (34). Simply to assume the possibility of this sort of reduction, and the possibility of furnishing a truly unifying account of reality in terms of any such reduction base, is to court potential difficulty, and I will return to the worries these assumptions may generate for the project of the book momentarily.

The core elements of the metaphysics Ellis proposes are outlined in chapters 3-5: an essentialist view of natural kinds and laws, an ontology of categorical and dispositional properties coupled with a rejection of "strong dispositionalism", a view of causation in terms of processes and kinds of change, and a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us consider these elements briefly, in turn.

Ellis is struck by what he takes to be a readily apparent fact about the world: 'There appears to be an immense hierarchy of substantive natural kinds, that is, natural kinds whose instances are what Aristotle called "substances" ' (51). Natural kinds are a species of universal, have an objective, mind-independent existence, and may be distinguished by sets of intrinsic properties that are their 'real essences'. There are also, he maintains, a vast hierarchy of dynamical kinds (of events and processes) as well as natural kinds of property instances (tropes) and relation instances. While chemical kinds are a canonical example of Aristotelian kindhood, biological species, though similar in a number of ways, are not natural kinds but rather "cluster kinds" -- 'clusters of morphologically similar organisms whose similarities are due to their genetically similar constitutions' (59). Ellis contends that this view of kinds has immediate consequences for an account of laws of nature, for the dispositional properties of Aristotelian substances, at least some of which must constitute their real essences, determine their law-like behaviours, which are then described in scientific statements of law.

Interestingly, though Ellis suggests that the existence of natural kinds is readily apparent, he later qualifies this claim by suggesting that their existence is not an empirical discovery, but rather a metaphysical hypothesis proposed in order to explain regularities in nature. The argument given, following J. J. C. Smart, is that in the absence of such explanations the realist is left stranded with the unacceptable notion of cosmic coincidences, which is itself tantamount to 'scientific phenomenalism' (53-4). This conflates, however, two aspects of empiricism that Ellis clearly wishes to oppose. The idea of scientific phenomenalism -- the empiricist reduction of scientific knowledge to observational data or experience -- is detachable from and thus independent of the empiricist analysis of laws in terms of regularity. More importantly for the account of kinds proposed, the emphasis placed on real essences as a necessary condition for natural kindhood would seem to undermine the explanatory project of the book, given that only some sciences (presumably fundamental physics and chemistry) admit of such kinds. A dilemma looms here. Ellis maintains that only kinds with real essences are genuine natural kinds, but if that is so, then the 'immense hierarchy' of kinds he imagines collapses into to a relatively diminutive hierarchy. On the other hand, if one takes the scientific-taxonomical categories which might conceivably populate an impressive hierarchy seriously, relatively few satisfy Ellis' definition of a natural kind.¹

Underwriting this ontology of kinds and laws is an ontology of properties and relations, and among the many theses Ellis advances concerning them, two are emphasized above all. The first is that there are at least two fundamental kinds of properties: dispositional properties, which include those commonly referred to as causal powers, capacities, and propensities; and categorical properties, which include spatiotemporal and numerical properties. The main argument in favour of this claim stems from the supposition that dispositional properties form at least part of the essences of natural kinds. If this is so, Ellis maintains, one must make recourse to explanations of their behaviour in terms of the conditions relevant to the manifestations of these dispositions, and these conditions include the instantiation of spatiotemporal properties (and relations; 63, 101). But spatiotemporal properties (and likewise, numerical properties) are not dispositional; therefore, there must be at least two kinds of properties. This leads to the second point of emphasis here, which is Ellis' opposition to arguments in favour of "strong dispositionalism" -- the thesis that there are only dispositional properties.

Strong dispositionalism is sometimes motivated by concerns to the effect that if a property had no causal powers, it could not be known, and furthermore, its identity would depend on a quiddity -- a primitive principle of property identity -- which is (arguably) more mysterious, metaphysically speaking, than the notion of a disposition. In response, Ellis argues that quiddities are not in fact mysterious, because they are observable; he cites shape as an example of an observable quiddity (105). This is a peculiar response, however, not least because quiddities are by definition primitive principles of identity, not qualitative properties such as shape. That Ellis has something rather different in mind by 'quiddity' than his interlocutors is evident in his suggestion that categorical properties, while not themselves causal powers, may nonetheless play causal roles. Given his eagerness to assign categorical properties a role in causation, one might wonder why they could not be bundles of dispositions. (There are historical objections to such a view, but since Ellis accepts the idea that at least some properties are irreducible causal powers (56), presumably he does not find such objections worrisome.) His distinction between dispositional and categorical properties appears to have something to do with the putatively active nature of the former, and the passive nature of the latter. But whatever this might mean, without begging the question, why assume that shape (for example) is passive?

The final pieces of Ellis' ontological puzzle concern the nature of causal processes and change, and the implications of this for a realist understanding of quantum mechanics. Causation is described in terms of processes involving physical events, which are changes in forms or distributions of energy. Causal processes are ones in which physical systems gain or lose energy, and admit of two natural kinds: temporally extended, continuous processes, which are inertial and transmit energy locally; and spatially extended, discontinuous, instantaneous (or nearly instantaneous) processes, which are not inertial and do not transmit energy. Examples of the latter include radioactive decay, particle emissions, absorptions, annihilations, and quantum wave packet collapse. An 'elementary causal process' is one in which there is an emission event, followed by a Schrödinger wave transmission process, followed by an absorption event (83-7). Ellis contends that scientific realists must be realists about Schrödinger waves, and suggests that quantum particles are transmitted as waves but then act in a classically determinate fashion on absorption. 'The waves must be supposed to propagate property realisation potentials' (74); 'the transmitted wave has the potential to reconstitute itself into a particle in an instant, or at least in a very short period of time, and act accordingly' (75).

These are stimulating proposals which beg for consideration illuminated by the detailed work that has been done by philosophers in these areas. The concept of a causal process presented here bears a strong family resemblance to proposals elaborated by Phil Dowe and Wesley Salmon. In the considered view of both of these authors, however, physical causal processes are not restricted to energy transmission; they include the transmission of any conserved quantity such as linear momentum, angular momentum, and electric charge.² The best developed collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics are variations on a proposal by Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber (GRW, 1986), but even on this most refined model of collapse, there are violations of the conservation of energy and momentum (small enough to be unobservable, but there nonetheless). Furthermore, there is no absolute dissolution of superposition: on collapse, the wave functions of particles have tails extending over the whole of space. Such particles are thus not (strictly speaking, according to the property assignment rules of quantum mechanics) located anywhere, which significantly undermines the notion that they "act classically".³ The details of the literature surrounding causal processes and collapse theories in quantum mechanics suggest that Ellis' proposals in these areas are, perhaps, somewhat underdeveloped.

What then of the hunger for a first philosophy? Ellis hopes that, developed in the ways he suggests, the ontology of scientific realism furnishes 'a theory of the nature of reality that can reasonably adjudicate between theories in any field of enquiry that makes assumptions about what there is in the real world' (1). But this is revealed as a bridge too far. One difficulty already intimated is that, as Ellis himself acknowledges (x), the book is not much connected to nor does it take account of the relevant literature. The rationale for this is that the arguments presented do not much depend on or respond to the work of others, but this may give one pause. The arguments of the book do concern substantive philosophical positions whose strengths and weaknesses have been much discussed, and no account of them can hope to be compelling if insulated from the telling insights of fellow travellers.

A second difficulty concerns the very conception of the project itself. For even if one were to accept the ontology proposed, it would not, could not, and should not constrain much other theorizing about the world. Causation in biology, for example, is not often analyzed in terms of energy transmission, let alone in terms of emission and absorption events connected by Schrödinger waves (nor could they or should they be). Perhaps this worry is best illustrated by the final chapter, which argues for a position Ellis calls 'social contractual utilitarianism', exemplifying the idea that moral obligations are social obligations that would be operative in an ideal society. How this might be connected to the ontology sketched earlier, however, is a mystery. It is noted that moral philosophy must be compatible with physical determinism and evolutionary theory (141), and that the relevant categories of moral philosophy (human beings and social categories of individuals and organizations) are not natural kinds (143, 150), but the ontological theses elaborated earlier play no role in this discussion. Indeed, how could they? It is hard to imagine what relevance such theses could have to moral philosophy.

The prospect of constructing a metaphysics of scientific realism to serve as a first philosophy thus remains a grand aspiration. Nevertheless, while those uninitiated in the topics addressed by the book may well not learn here what is at stake in the lively debates surrounding them, initiates will surely enjoy and appreciate this manifesto from one of philosophy's most important and formatively influential authors in the metaphysics of science.

Acknowledgments

For helpful conversations on these and related matters, I am grateful to Joseph Berkovitz, Curtis Forbes, Kerry McKenzie, William Seager, and Emma Tobin.

References

Albert, D. Z. 1992: Quantum Mechanics and Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Chakravartty, A. 2007: A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dowe, P. 1992: 'Wesley Salmon's Process Theory of Causality and the Conserved Quantity Theory', Philosophy of Science 59: 195-216.

Ghirardi, G. 2007: 'Collapse Theories', in E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Ghirardi, G. C., A. Rimini, and T. Weber 1986: 'Unified Dynamics for Microscopic and Macroscopic Systems', Physical Review D 34: 470-491.

Salmon, W. C. 1997: 'Causality and Explanation: A Reply to Two Critiques', Philosophy of Science 64: 461-477.

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¹ For a discussion of the relationship between natural kind theorizing and scientific taxonomy, see Chakravartty 2007, chapter 6.

² For early work on this view, see Dowe 1992 and Salmon 1997.

³ For an overview of the challenges facing GRW, see Albert 1992, chapter 5, and for an overview of the latest developments of the view, see Ghirardi 2007.

NDPR Jacques Ranci=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=A8re=2C_?= Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-07-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steven Corcoran (ed., tr.), Continuum, 2010, 230 pp., $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781847064455.

Reviewed by Todd May, Clemson University

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Whenever a French philosopher begins to become fashionable, one can expect a growing cascade of translations of his work. Not only will the major and minor texts appear, but also various sorts of collected writings. The general purpose of the latter is often ostensibly to provide an introduction to the thinker's work, but many of these collections often turn out to be hodge-podges of writings with no coherent internal connection whose real goal is to shore up the failing fortunes of a small press.

This is emphatically not the case with the collection under review. Steven Corcoran has provided a timely and coherently organized collection of Rancière's short writings, one that can stand as a solid introduction to the author's thought. Corcoran comes to the task already conversant with Rancière's work, having translated two other works of Rancière's, Hatred of Democracy and Aesthetics and its Discontents, as well as a number of books by Rancière's intellectual colleague Alain Badiou.

Constructing an introduction like this one to Rancière's work presents a singular challenge. One can mark two distinct but related periods in his "mature" work, which cover two distinct but related themes: politics and aesthetics. The former period might be said, a bit arbitrarily, to begin with the 1987 appearance of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and culminates with Disagreement, published in 1995. The latter period perhaps starts with the 1998 publication of Silent Speech (forthcoming in English) and continues to the present day. Such a dating is a bit arbitrary, however, since there are aesthetic writings from before 1998 and political writings from after that date. There is a distinct shift of emphasis that occurs in Rancière's writings around the late 1990's, however, and the task of a good collection would be to capture both periods and the thematic interaction between them. The writings gathered here, which date from 1996 to 2004, perform both tasks admirably.

For Rancière, politics is not a matter of what people receive or demand. It is not a matter of the institutional creation of just social arrangements. Rather, it is a matter of what people do, and in particular what they do that challenges the hierarchical order of a given set of social arrangements. To challenge such a hierarchical order is to act under the presupposition of one's own equality. Such action, if it is political, is going to be collective rather than individual. It will concern a group of people (or a subset of that group) who have been presupposed unequal by a particular hierarchical order, as well as those in solidarity with them, acting as though they were indeed equal to those above them in the order, and thus disrupting the social order itself. What are disrupted are not only the power arrangements of the social order, but, and more deeply, the perceptual and epistemic underpinnings of that order, the obviousness and naturalness that attaches to the order. Such a disruption is what Rancière calls a dissensus. Described this way, one can begin to see its interaction with aesthetic concerns. A dissensus is not merely a disagreement about the justice of particular social arrangements, although it is that as well. It is also the revelation of the contingency of the entire perceptual and conceptual order in which such arrangements are embedded, the contingency of what Rancière calls le partage du sensible, the partition or distribution of the sensible.

Aesthetics is also a challenge to a particular partition of the sensible, but in a different way. Before we understand how it challenges the sensible, however, we must bear in mind that aesthetics is not, in Rancière's use, a reference term for art as a whole, but rather for a particular regime of artistic practice, a regime in which, as Corcoran notes in his excellent introduction to the volume, "the field of experience, severed from its traditional reference points, is therefore open for new restructurings through the 'free play' of aestheticization." (p. 17) This free play is one that reveals the contingency of a particular partition of the sensible by constructing another one, one based not upon the hierarchy of the current partition but upon certain "equalities," for example the equal aesthetic worthiness of all subjects, activities, and objects. (One might consider here one of Rancière's favorite examples, Madame Bovary, in which the adultery of a bourgeois woman is considered as aesthetically worthy of treatment as the exploits of a heroic character.) An aesthetic practice, then, like politics, is a dissensus from a given partition of the sensible. As Rancière notes, "Art and politics each define a form of dissensus, a dissensual re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible." (p. 140)

The difference between politics and aesthetics lies in the character of the dissensual movements they create. The aesthetic movement of politics "consists above all in the framing of a we, a subject of collective demonstration whose emergence is the element that disrupts the distribution of social parts." (pp. 141-2) The political character of aesthetics, by contrast,

does not give a collective voice to the anonymous. Instead, it re-frames the world of common experience as the world of a shared impersonal experience. In this way, it aids to help create the fabric of a common experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed. (p. 142)

While intertwined, then, politics and aesthetics remain distinct types of dissensus, a point Rancière also insists upon in what may be his most widely read book in English, The Politics of Aesthetics.

If the texts gathered in Dissensus are often focused on the relation of politics to aesthetics, this is not to the detriment of Rancière's particular treatments of each. The politics section offers a coherent set of essays that give a strong sense of Rancière's view of the general character of politics as well as some of his more topical views. It begins with "Ten Theses on Politics," a summation of the political perspective Rancière develops in Disagreement. It moves on to discussions of his view of democracy and consensus. The latter concept is particularly important to an understanding of Rancière's work, for two reasons. First, it is against the background of consensus that his idea of dissensus is developed. Second, the concern with consensus forms a bridge between Rancière's more theoretical concerns and his interventions into topical politics, which are the focus of the last several essays in the section on politics. In Rancière's view, we are living in a time of consensus, which does not mean that everyone agrees with all the public policies promoted by the elites, but rather that there is a general agreement that the partition of the sensible and its distribution of roles is a reasonable one, and that there is no reasonable alternative to it. As he succinctly puts the point in Chronique des temps consensuels,

The consensus that governs us is a machine of power insofar as it is a machine of vision. It pretends to verify only what everyone can see by adjusting two propositions on the state of the world: one which says that we are finally at peace, and the other which announces the condition of this peace: the recognition that there is only what there is. (Paris: Seuil, 2005, p. 8)

I should note that two of the smaller pieces in the section on politics will be of interest not only to introductory students of Rancière's thought, but also those more conversant with his work. "The People or the Multitudes?" distinguishes Rancière's concept of the people from Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude. In that piece, Rancière argues that in order for there to be a politics, there must be a dissensus or a break with the established order. This dissensus is obscured in Hardt and Negri's adoption of Deleuze's expressive immanence, and in fact is dismissed as a paranoid reaction. However, it finds its way back into their thought when they turn toward specific interventions. "Biopolitics or Politics?" distinguishes Foucault's conception of biopower from that of Agamben and more recent thinkers, and shows the alignment of Rancière's thought with the former but not with the latter.

The aesthetics section is, in keeping with Rancière's writings, a little more elusive than the politics section. This is in part because, in his view, the aesthetic regime is constituted by paradoxes, and the project of art in the aesthetic regime is to navigate these paradoxes without reducing one side of the paradox to the other. For instance, in aesthetics there is no particular border that separates art from life; however, art is not the same thing as life either. The challenge confronting contemporary artists, then, is how to keep alive the dissensus of art without simply reducing it to the reality from which it dissents or claiming that that reality is nothing other than art.

The aesthetics section includes what is, to my mind, one of the most important of Rancière's recent writings, the final chapter of Corcoran's translation of Malaise dans l'esthétique (entitled Aesthetics and its Discontents in translation). "The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics" discusses the recent "ethical" orientation of both aesthetic and political thought, particularly as it appears in Lyotard's writings on the sublime and the Holocaust as well as those who have inherited the mantle of Levinas' ethics of the Other. In this text, Rancière details the way in which the turn to the sublime and the use of the Holocaust as a grid for political intervention remove from people their ability to act. On the political level, the claim that there just is evil in the world and that it cannot be eliminated, only alleviated, leads toward a politics of humanitarian intervention which both justifies in advance those with advanced military power and disempowers, indeed de-legitimates, movements that take place from below, movements of what Rancière calls the people or the demos. The treatment of current humanitarian and interventionist discourse in this chapter is one of the most perspicacious I have read anywhere.

Dissensus closes with a reflection Rancière offers on the trajectory of his work, detailing not only some of his own views but also reflecting on his methodological commitments, and on how they have led him to write in the sometimes elusive, sometimes ironic, manner that he does.

There are, of course, gaps in the texts of Dissensus. For instance, the distinctions between the ethical, representational, and aesthetic regimes, while glossed in Corcoran's introduction, do not make much of an appearance in the text. However, to complain about omissions like this one is simply to note that not all of Rancière's thought can be brought between the covers of a two-hundred page book. For those who seek to get a sense both of the richness and the breadth of the work of one of the most significant thinkers of our time, Dissensus provide a valuable resource. I can think of no better starting point than this collection.

NDPR Raffaella De Rosa, Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-06-41 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Raffaella De Rosa, Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation, Oxford UP, 2010, 190 pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199570379.

Reviewed by David Clemenson, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)

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The fundamental principle of [the modern, anti-Aristotelian] philosophy is the opinion concerning colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat and cold; which it asserts to be nothing but impressions in the mind, deriv'd from the operation of external objects, and without any resemblance to the qualities of the objects (David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, bk. I, pt. 4, sec. 4).

If Hume were alive today he might be disappointed to find that this "fundamental principle" is not the center of attention of twenty-first century historians of early modern philosophy. But the precise content of this principle is surprisingly difficult to determine. The major early moderns wrote few ex professo works on sensation and sensory qualities (Berkeley's An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision is a notable exception). As a rule, their views must be pieced together from isolated passages in diverse publications, private papers, and letters. In most cases, these passages are not easily reduced to a clear and coherent doctrine.

This is certainly true of Descartes' diverse remarks on sensation. Anyone hoping to distill a unified doctrine from these remarks must first determine what he understood by sensus (Latin for "sensation" -- though it can also mean "sense faculty"). According to the Meditations' Sixth Set of Replies (AT VII 436-38), there are at least three distinct meanings that the word may bear. First-level "sensation" is the purely corporeal action of the environment on the body's sense organs, culminating in certain processes or states in the brain; such "sensations" do not involve consciousness, and even non-rational animals have them. At the opposite extreme, third-level "sensations" include all habitual (and commonly unnoticed) judgments -- acts of pure intellect -- that are occasioned by the relevant sensory brain-state (these include judgments concerning external bodies' size and distance occasioned by the brain-states that cause visual sensations). But the only thoughts that we should attribute to the sense faculty, "should we wish to distinguish it accurately from the intellect" ("nihil aliud ad sensum referendum, si accurate illum ab intellectu distinguere vellemus", ibid., 437), are second-level sensations, the mental modes that "immediately result" from the mind's union with the body. For Descartes, application of the term sensus to the processes, states, or acts of the first or third level -- e.g., the habitual and unnoticed "visual perceptual" judgments concerning the size and distance of external bodies -- is merely a concession to common usage (a concession Descartes is typically very willing to make, as long as there is no pressing need for greater accuracy). For the rest of this review, the word 'sensation' will be taken to mean "second-level sensation," unless otherwise noted.

It used to be assumed that Descartes considered sensations to intentionally represent nothing outside the mind (few readers will require the reminder that in the philosophy of mind "intentional" and its cognates normally designate not volition, but the attribute of thoughts in virtue of which they have an object or content). This is how he was read by early Cartesians such as Malebranche. I will call this "the received interpretation" ("RI"). According to RI, Descartes took sensations to be more or less reliable signals of certain conditions in the environment, but did not think that they themselves made these conditions present to (or in) the mind, and so did not count them as intentional representations (or intentional misrepresentations) of such conditions. For him, only concepts were intentional representations of this kind.

Over the past twenty years, RI has been challenged by several prominent commentators, for whom Descartes took sensations, as well as concepts, to be capable of intentionally representing (or misrepresenting) certain aspects of the external world. Raffaella De Rosa's Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation is at once a critique and an endorsement of this new, "anti-RI" line of interpretation. At least a third of the book is an attack on the views of some of its best-known representatives, especially Margaret Wilson, Tad Schmaltz, and Alison Simmons (the views of Martha Bolton, Andrew Pessin, and Paul Hoffman are also considered, but in less detail). Yet De Rosa agrees with them in rejecting RI. She sets forth a novel anti-RI interpretation, which she calls "descriptivist-causal" (hereafter, "DCI"), designed to capture the strengths of earlier anti-RI readings while avoiding their defects. Limitations of space prevent me from commenting on De Rosa's critique of competing anti-RI interpretations. This review is restricted to a summary and brief critique of DCI.

According to DCI, sensations of colors, sounds, etc., in Descartes' philosophy (henceforth, "Cartesian sensations"), are, pace RI, intentional (mis)representations of the extramental environment. But sensory representation of these features does not consist in being normally caused or occasioned by those features, pace Wilson and Schmaltz (ch. 3), or in serving as a reliable sign of environmental conditions tending to promote or hinder the survival of the mind-body union, pace Simmons (ch. 4). Instead, it consists in the sensation's containing innate concepts of extension and its modes. Since all such concepts are intentional representations of actual or possible extension or extension-modes, Cartesian sensations contain intentional representations of such items (pp. 145, 172, and passim). But for DCI Cartesian sensations misrepresent the nature of matter, by mingling the clear and distinct idea of extension with an obscure and confused qualitative content (pp. 43-44 and passim).

More precisely, Cartesian sensations are ideas, and as such have "both a presentational and referential content" (pp. 32, 143) -- the latter being the intentionally represented object (whether actual or merely possible), and the former being the way in which that object is represented. A Cartesian sensation's presentational content is two-fold, comprising (a) the presentational content of the sensation's constituent concepts and (b) the aforementioned phenomenal aspects. Because these phenomenal aspects are not the presentational content of any concept, they cannot serve as a way of representing things as they really are (only concepts can do that, p. 32). It is the presence, within the sensation's presentational content, of these phenomenal aspects that constitutes the sensation as capable of misrepresenting an actual or possible extramental object. On the other hand, because the sensation's presentational content also contains non-phenomenal aspects, namely, the presentational content of the concepts contained within the sensation, the sensation does succeed in representing something outside the mind. The presentational content of a concept is not phenomenal or qualitative, and does not consist in any likeness to the represented object (p. 176). Rather, it consists in being a description that is satisfied by that object (pp. 2, 18-19). The object satisfies this descriptive aspect of the sensation "only after a (reflective) process of clarification and analysis of the confused sensory content" (p. 123), however.

In sum, sensory representation has both an innate "descriptive" dimension, in virtue of which it succeeds in referring (via correct description) to the true nature of matter and its modes, and a "causal" (or externally caused) dimension, the phenomenal qualia that arise solely because of the body's action on the mind, and that intentionally represent nothing extramental. From the standpoint of DCI, RI correctly identifies the second of these dimensions, but overlooks the first, while the non-traditional readings advocated by Wilson, Schmaltz, and Simmons give the first dimension its due, but neglect the second. Only a descriptivist-causal interpretation can do justice to both.

These considerations, De Rosa claims, suffice to solve an old puzzle, mentioned in the title of her book, that was posed for Descartes by Arnauld in the Fourth Set of Objections to the Meditations. Noting that for Descartes an idea of x is just x itself (in the "objective" mode of being proper to objects of awareness; cf. the Third Meditation, and the First Set of Replies), and so must possess all the characteristics of x, Arnauld concluded that no Cartesian sensory idea (and a fortiori no other Cartesian idea) can represent its object as other than it is (cf. pp. 28-30, 152-60) -- contrary to what Arnauld took Descartes to be saying in certain passages in the Third Meditation. De Rosa solves the puzzle by attributing to Arnauld the mistake she takes to be characteristic of RI: Arnauld has noted only the descriptivist dimension of sensations, while overlooking the causal or phenomenal element that alone makes it possible for these ideas to misrepresent their objects. In so doing he has in effect confused sensations with clear and distinct innate concepts, which alone are incapable of intentional misrepresentation.

This completes the summary of what I take to be the main points of De Rosa's DCI. Some critical observations follow.

(1) DCI is distinguished from other anti-RI readings of Cartesian sensation theory mainly by its claim that sensation has a (partly) conceptual character. But more must be said about what this conceptual character amounts to. Since (as noted in the description of Arnauld's "puzzle") Descartes speaks of concepts as identical to what they represent -- the idea of the sun, he says, is the sun (not qua in the sky, but qua in the mind) -- are we to assume that the description that for DCI constitutes the presentational content of a concept of x is simply x itself, qua in the mind? If so, since identity to x entails resemblance to x, why deny, as DCI does, that descriptions resemble the thing described? Furthermore, if concepts are identical to the thing described, how does the concept's presentational content differ from its referential content? Is not the referential content of an idea of x also x qua in the mind? A fuller account of such points seems required.

(2) The passage from the Sixth Set of Replies cited at the outset of this review is of course well known to De Rosa. She seems to take it to imply that bodies are intentionally represented by second-level sensations, inasmuch as such judgments are there said (she claims) to result from second-level sensations (p. 50; cf. p. 47, where a similar claim is made about AT VIII-1 32). But the relevant passage, "ex isto coloris sensu, quo afficior, judicem [corpus], extra me positum, esse coloratum" (AT VII 437, ll. 25-27) does not obviously imply that our erroneous judgments attributing colors to bodies result from any intentional representation by sensation of bodies as colored. Nor (pace pp. 47-48) is any such implication evident in the Sixth Meditation and Principles I.66-74, which treat at length the question of why we make (erroneous) judgments of this kind. On the contrary, Principles I.66 states that the source of these errors lies in allowing our judgments to include more than what is "strictly contained in our perception" (CSM 2: 216; AT VIII-1 32). This suggests that the "strict content" of sensation excludes intentional misrepresentation of conditions in the environment. All this casts doubt on the claim (p. 62) that Descartes' remarks on the origin of erroneous judgments attributing colors, etc. to bodies are better explained by DCI than by RI.

(3) The Sixth Set of Replies passage does not directly refute De Rosa's claim that second-level sensations are or include an intentional representation. But since (as I noted earlier) Descartes is quite happy to "speak with the vulgar," whenever he thinks that the context makes his meaning clear enough, it does raise the possibility that an undetermined proportion of the texts cited in her book as implying the concept-ladenness of second-level sensations refer instead to "sensations" in the third-level sense -- in which case it is uncertain (pending further clarification) which of these texts, if any, give reason for preferring DCI to RI.

(4) De Rosa (p. 48) takes the following passage from Principles I.70 to entail that sensations are intentional representations:

when we say that we perceive colours in objects, this is really just the same as saying that we perceive something in the objects whose nature we do not know, but which produces in us a certain very clear and vivid sensation which we call the sensation of colour (CSM 1: 218; AT VIII-1 34).

But such an entailment is far from clear, since Descartes does not say that the claim "we perceive colours in objects" is true, and since "perceive" cannot always be assumed to mean "have a sensation that intentionally represents" (it can designate third-level "sensations," which for Descartes are not sensations sensu stricto).

(5) If Cartesian sensations are normally misrepresentations then Descartes would seem to be committed to the view that God is a deceiver, hence imperfect, hence not God. Although some imaginations are voluntary (in the sense that the mind's volition causes or occasions, via the mind-body union, a brain-state that is the immediate cause of the desired image), no sensation is voluntary. One who is forced by nature -- hence, by nature's author, God -- to have intentional representations that exhibit extension as having characteristics that it cannot have, must, it seems, be considered the victim of divine deception. True, God has given us an intellect by which we may discover our second-level sensations to be misrepresentations (cf. p. 75), but even a discovered misrepresentation is still a misrepresentation. For the reasons just given, it is not easy to see how such misrepresentations as DCI takes sensations to be can fail to count as deceptions perpetrated by God. One might reply that, nevertheless, Descartes must have thought of sensations as deceptive in this way, since he calls them "materially false" in the Third Meditation, the Fourth Set of Replies, and the Conversation with Burman (cf. pp. 43, 56­-57). This brings me to my next point.

(6) According to De Rosa (p. 56) the strongest evidence against RI is provided by the material falsity passages just mentioned. But these passages need not be read as ascribing intentional misrepresentation to second-level sensation; see, for example, the analysis in Richard Field's 1993 Philosophical Review article, or pp. 85-91 of my 2007 book (reviewed in NDPR by Dan Kaufman). Since De Rosa does not argue for the superiority of her own reading to these alternatives, which do not contradict RI, her argument (pp. 56-60) that these passages refute RI must be judged inconclusive. For the same reason, the material falsity passages do not obviously establish the deceptiveness of Cartesian sensations (cf. the immediately preceding point 5).

(7) Even if De Rosa's arguments on pp. 54-55 and 60-66 established that Cartesian sensations are intentional representations, this would not show that they intentionally represent actual or possible extramental objects; sensations might instead be (confused) intentional representations of mental modes (e.g., themselves), and intentionally represent nothing extramental. This would be consistent with RI, as it was defined above, but not with DCI. De Rosa argues against such a view of Cartesian sensations as representations of mental modes (which she attributes to Alan Nelson) on pp. 51-53, but her arguments here are unconvincing. First we are told (p. 52) that it is "just a fact" that sensations "present themselves as if of objects." While Descartes can safely be assumed to have held such a view of third-level "sensations," it is less clear that he held such a view of sensations in the strict, second-level sense. But even if he did, how do we know that he did not take sensations' intentionally represented objects to be mental modes (e.g. themselves)? Next (ibid.), De Rosa appears to say that Descartes' "doctrine of the transparency of thought" entails that no sensation can intentionally represent itself. But because she does not define this doctrine, it is impossible to judge the soundness of her argument. Finally, she implies (ibid.) that Cartesian sensations cannot intentionally represent themselves, inasmuch as they are not ideas of reflection. But if "ideas of reflection" are voluntary ideas that intentionally represent some other (modally distinct) idea, then Cartesian sensations, which are involuntary, are by definition not ideas of reflection. Whether they intentionally represent themselves is a separate question. (There is evidence that for Descartes every thought is or includes an intentional representation of itself; cf. AT VII, 559.)

(8) On pp. 42-44 De Rosa argues against the soundness of a particular argument in support of RI, which she labels "(KI)" (for "the key inference"). (KI) runs as follows: "There are no real properties of bodies that resemble the sensation of color and the like, according to Cartesian physics; therefore, sensations of color and the like do not represent anything outside the mind." De Rosa's attack on (KI) depends on interpreting the material falsity passages as asserting sensations to be intentional misrepresentations of the environment. Since (cf. point 6) this reading is not shown to be superior to others, with which it is inconsistent, her argument here is in need of further development. (Her attack on (KI) also involves the suggestion that in Descartes' idea theory resemblance is not a necessary condition for intentional representation -- a suggestion that seems dubious, in light of considerations raised in point 1 above.)

In spite of these (perceived) imperfections, De Rosa's book presents an interesting thesis (as I hope the summary, preceding the criticisms, makes clear). It also addresses a wide range of Cartesian texts, and provides a useful entrée into the complex literature on Cartesian sensation theory. It is therefore a worthy contribution to the field. It should promote discussion of a topic that Hume rightly considered indispensible to an in-depth understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy.

NDPR John Cottingham, Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-06-40 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, Oxford UP, 2010, 391pp., $99.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199556120.

Reviewed by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado at Boulder

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No one, not even a scholar as distinguished as Anthony Kenny, could ask for a more handsome published tribute than this: sixteen essays by first-class scholars, ranging over the full spectrum of Kenny's historical interests, each offering its own personal homage to the honoree before embarking on historical scholarship of the highest order. The volume is neatly divided into four groups of four:

1. Essays on Aristotle by Sarah Broadie, Jonathan Barnes, David Charles, and Christopher Shields.

2. Essays on Aquinas by Terence Irwin, John Haldane, David Oderberg, and Brian Davies.

3. Essays on Descartes by Desmond Clarke, John Cottingham, Stephen Gaukroger, and Marleen Rozemond.

4. Essays on Wittgenstein by Peter Hacker, Hans-Johann Glock, Joachim Schulte, and Severin Schroeder.

All of this is sandwiched between the editors' preface, which surveys Kenny's career, and a comprehensive bibliography of Kenny's writings. A look at either of these is likely to surprise even the most confirmed of Kenny's fans with its account of just how much he has written (and is still writing) over such a wide range of topics. If there are few readers out there who will be interested in the full range of topics covered here, that must count not as a criticism of this volume, but as another form of tribute to the inimitable range of Kenny's work.

As the editors point out, and as several subsequent contributions underscore, much of Kenny's earliest work was not historical at all, but rather devoted to topics in the philosophy of mind and action. Even so, this volume's historical focus reflects the side of Kenny's work that has had the most influence, and that he has most persistently cultivated. He himself -- as prolific with respect to his own history as he is in other domains -- has offered a remarkably forthright explanation of why he made this turn:

In my first years as a professional philosopher, I attempted to make original discoveries in . . . areas such as . . . the theory of action. . . . After I had written a few books in this area, however, I realized that I was not able enough to compete with the best of my philosophical colleagues. I came to see that the best contribution I could make to the subject was to provide introductions, in contemporary terms, to the great philosophers of the past (as quoted in Cottingham's contribution to this volume, p. 208n).

It is hard to know what to marvel at most here, the notion that Kenny turned away from "original discoveries" because he could not "compete with the best" (how many of us can?), or else that what he did instead was simply to "provide introductions" to various historical figures (as if he has been busily writing textbooks for Wadsworth).

Each of these sixteen chapters follows the scholarly agenda that Kenny set for himself, and, indeed, helped set for historians of philosophy everywhere -- not to write "introductions," to be sure, but to approach the study of philosophy's history with the same sort of analytic rigor ordinarily applied to "original" research. Although the quality of the chapters is not as uniformly high as one finds in top peer-reviewed journals, the volume offers by way of compensation a good many distinguished scholars whose work is not likely to be found in such venues. At the same time, quite a few of the chapters suffer from that familiar form of academic sclerosis that causes senior scholars to rely increasingly on their own earlier published work, at the expense of others' research, so that their footnotes became a kind of sublinear curriculum vitae. Even so, this is clearly the sort of volume that will get pulled off the library shelf for decades to come, as readers discover one or another good thing in it, and from there discover some other good thing in the very next chapter.

The first two parts of the book are rather diverse in their topics. In Part One, Broadie offers a close reading of Eudemian Ethics VIII.3, on the good and the noble. Barnes discusses the concept of destiny as it features in Alexander of Aphrodisias. Charles focuses on akrasia in Aristotle. Shields offers an account of the nature of Aristotelian actuality. In Part Two, Irwin grapples with the proliferation of discrete stages in Aquinas's theory of action. Haldane considers the status of mind in Aquinas. Oderberg heroically attempts to defend the First Way, and Davies discusses the nature of action in God. The chapters in Part Three all focus on the Cartesian mind: Clarke on the character of Descartes's dualism; Cottingham on free will; Gaukroger on perception and moral sensibility; Rozemond on the mind's simplicity and immortality. The essays in Part Four, though written by a less uniformly imposing group of contributors, have the compensating advantage of a unified focus, all revolving around Wittgenstein's work in philosophical psychology: Hacker offers a detailed account of its career-long development; Glock proposes a theory of concepts; Schulte focuses on the early writings; Schroeder takes up the perceiving of aspects.

Out of the vast range of topics and periods canvassed in this volume, I want to single out two interesting claims, both of which, as it happens, pertain to Descartes. First, Gaukroger considers in some detail the question of whether, for Descartes, non-human animals can be said to perceive. His answer is Yes. Whether this is the right answer will surely depend -- as Gaukroger would doubtless agree -- on exactly how we define 'perception.' Sometimes Descartes applies perceptual language to animals, and sometimes he does not. Gaukroger himself suggests a very interesting way to try to make the issues here more precise, when he asks whether, for Descartes, animals can perceive color. Gaukroger's answer is that they can, and that indeed "no one in the seventeenth century even raised the question of whether animals might not see the world as coloured" (p. 245). Whether or not the issue was explicitly discussed, it is certainly an interesting one to consider, if for no other reason than that it has a large bearing on whether we should say that animals perceive at all. After all, when one keeps in mind that the grayscale counts here as a color, it is hard (though perhaps not impossible?) to defend the thesis that animals perceive, but do not in any way perceive colors.

If colors are thought to be out in the world, then there seems no in-principle difficulty in allowing other animals to perceive them. (I will take for granted, following Gaukroger, that in some sense animals do perceive.) There is a case to be made that Descartes thinks colors are in the world -- after all, he sometimes says this (e.g., in the Regulae, the Discourse, the Optics) -- but the more common reading, accepted by Gaukroger, treats Descartes as denying that colors are in the world. Here is where the question about other animals becomes most interesting. One might suppose that, if colors are not in the world, then surely animals cannot perceive them. Consider the case of Galileo, who famously claims that colors reside only "in consciousness." Combine this view with the usual reading of Descartes on which animals are denied consciousness, and it would seem to follow that animals cannot perceive colors. Actually, however, what Galileo says in the The Assayer is not that color resides in consciousness, as the standard English translation has it, but that they reside "nel corpo sensitivo." This would seem to leave plenty of room for other animals to perceive colors. What the colors are, on this view, would be physical phenomena within the right sort of perceptual faculties, caused by certain patterns of light in the world. In effect, this is how Gaukroger reads Descartes. On his view, "the natural world is colourless," but color results from the way our eyes physically interact with the surfaces of objects: "indeed, colour enhancement in visual cognition is a paradigm psycho-physiological operation" (p. 245). Thus there is no problem with animal color vision.

This understanding of color is interestingly positioned between the two principal views on the topic: either that colors are on the surfaces of objects, or that they are phenomenal states. This compromise position accounts for the well-known arguments against color realism on the grounds of sensory variation and observer dependence. It also has the advantage, at least from the seventeenth-century perspective, of allowing a physical treatment of color, rather than requiring that colors be put in the notorious dustbin of the mind. Even so, I am doubtful whether this is right about Descartes. Certainly, some seventeenth-century authors want to treat colors as conscious, mental phenomena. According to Malebranche, for instance, "the heat we sense and the colors we see are only in the soul" (Search after Truth VI.2.2). Since animals, for Malebranche, have no souls, they cannot perceive colors. This seems to be Descartes's view as well, at least in those places where he wants to locate colors in perceivers rather than in the world. Both the Meditations and the Principles argue that colors, strictly speaking, are not out in the world but are instead our sensations. This much of course leaves open the question of what to say about other animals. But when Descartes speaks in this context of sensation, he seems to have in mind the sort of thing that only a mind can do -- that is, he is treating sensation as a kind of thought. This, at any rate, is what the Fifth Replies say: "colors, smells, tastes, and so on are merely certain sensations existing in my thought" (VII:440). It is also what the Principles says: "what we call the sensations of tastes, smells, sounds, heat, cold, light, colors, and so on -- sensations that do not represent anything located outside our thought" (I.71).

It is not hard to see why it seemed important to Descartes (and others) to bring colors all the way into the mind, and not only into the sensory organs. A considerable part of what motivates seventeenth-century theories of the secondary qualities is the notion that such qualities are essentially defined in terms of their having a certain sort of phenomenal appearance. But from here it seems to follow quite quickly that nothing outside the mind can possibly have a phenomenal look -- the world does not resemble the mind in these respects. In suggesting that non-conscious animals can perceive colors, Gaukroger ignores this important dimension of the seventeenth-century debate over secondary qualities.

The second claim I wish to consider in some detail arises in the course of Marleen Rozemond's discussion of a much-discussed passage from the Synopsis to the Meditations:

The premises that lead to the conclusion that the soul is immortal depend on an account of the whole of physics. This is required for two reasons. First, we need to know that absolutely all substances, or things that must be created by God in order to exist, are by their nature incorruptible and cannot ever cease to exist unless they are reduced to nothingness by God's denying his concurrence to them. Secondly, we need to recognize that body, taken in general, is a substance, so that it too never perishes. But the human body, in so far as it differs from other bodies, is simply made up of a certain configuration of limbs and other accidents of this sort, whereas the human mind is not made up of any accidents in this way, but is a pure substance (VII:13-14).

Descartes is here trying to explain why the Meditations does not attempt to establish the soul's immortality, and how he thinks such an argument might nevertheless go. The passage has been the subject of considerable commentary in recent years, because of its suggestive remarks about the status of material substances. Some read the passage as an indication that Descartes is a material monist, treating all of res extensa as just a single, incorruptible substance. Rozemond, rightly in my view, rejects this understanding of Descartes, but her concern here is with a less-remarked part of the passage: why Descartes should think that "an account of the whole of physics" is required to establish the soul's immortality. Her answer, developed over six carefully-argued pages (264-69), is that physics for Descartes is the key to the rejection of substantial form, and that the rejection of substantial form is the key to proving the soul's immortality.

This seems to me a good start toward understanding what Descartes is up to, but only a start. The above passage, though convoluted in its structure, can be stripped down to one very simple argument:

1. Pure substances are incorruptible.

2. The mind (or soul) is a pure substance

3. ∴ The mind is incorruptible (i.e., immortal).

What a "pure substance" is, in the context of this passage, is a matter of considerable controversy, but I think Rozemond and I are in agreement that the pure substances are the fundamental entities in Descartes's ontology, from which other "things," like the human body, are somehow temporarily constructed. Why we should accept premise 1 -- that these fundamental entities are incorruptible -- is quite unclear, and Rozemond offers no help here. But she thinks that Descartes invokes physics at this point to narrow the pool of candidates for the title of pure substance, by excluding substantial forms. This much is surely right. From the vantage point of 1641, the most likely scenario on which the human soul would turn out not to be immortal is one on which the soul turns out to be a soul like the souls of other animals -- that is, the kind of substantial form whose existence depends on the existence of the body, and which comes and goes as the animal's body does. Scholastic proofs of the soul's immortality tried to draw a distinction between substantial forms of that kind and the kind of substantial form that includes a mind. Descartes's strategy, Rozemond rightly argues, is instead to reject the category of substantial form entirely, by offering an improved physics.

My only objection is that there is still more to the story. Descartes would need to set out "the whole of physics" to make his argument run, because the argument must reject every candidate for mind that would threaten premise 2. This means not just ruling out corruptible substantial forms, but also ruling out all the other candidates for mind that one or another fanciful metaphysics has postulated as perishable constituents of the world. Accidents, for instance, are perishable, and so a proof of the mind's immortality must be able to rule this out as a possibility for what the mind is. Descartes's physics does so, of course, not by showing that the soul is not an accident, but by showing that there are no accidents. Descartes must also -- and here is where things become really interesting -- reject composite bodies as a candidate for the mind. Scholastic authors did this, typically, by arguing for the mind's immateriality. The fascinating implication of the Synopsis passage is that Descartes would argue against the mind's corporeality in a radically different way -- not by showing it to be immaterial, but by undermining the reality of ordinary bodies. This too is evidently the job of physics: to show that ordinary bodies (e.g., the human body) are not the fundamental entities, and that instead the fundamental entities on the side of res extensa are the enduring constituents of such bodies. Since Descartes is not an atomist, it is not immediately obvious at what level he thinks we have the pure substances of res extensa. (This is part of what drives some toward taking Descartes to be a material monist.) However that story is to go, Descartes's concern here is only to rule out yet another possibility for what the mind might be: the mind is not a composite body.

Most basically, then, the immortality argument sketched in the Synopsis proceeds by establishing through physics that the basic constituents in the world are not the sorts of constituents postulated either by scholastic metaphysics or by commonsense. They are, instead, the incorruptible building blocks of God's creation. If one grants the passage's underlying assumption that the human mind is one of those basic constituents, then Descartes can establish the mind's immortality without even needing to establish its immateriality. Whether or not the mind counts as a body, it is a fundamental entity, and that is all this argument needs. Since the Meditations aims instead at immateriality, via the famous real-distinction argument, the Synopsis argument for immortality requires a different foundation altogether, one grounded in a complete and reductive theory of physics.

NDPR Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-06-36 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology, Cambridge UP, 2009, 309pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521876797.

Reviewed by Kenneth Knies, Husserl Archives, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

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We are resending this review because the earlier version contained an editorial error that altered the reviewer's meaning in the first paragraph. We apologize for the error.

The topic of de Warren's study, inner-time consciousness, is hardly discussed in phenomenological circles without an invocation of its "notorious difficulty." Indeed, Husserl never ceased returning to what he himself often called the most difficult of all phenomenological problems. The difficulties of time-consciousness, moreover, do not concern a particularly vexing topic within a defined field and method of philosophical research. As de Warren's title indicates, the very promise of phenomenology as transcendental philosophy hinges upon its ability to describe the concrete experiencing in which all possible domains of transcendent being are displayed. This experiencing is itself temporal in its nature or "sense of being" (30). Coming to terms with the difficulties of time-consciousness is thus necessary if descriptions of phenomenologically defined terms are not to remain ignorant of the most basic structures inherent in experience itself. This task that Husserl has bequeathed to his followers is complicated by the fact that his on-going efforts to understand time not only trace a course of self-criticism but also attain a dizzying level of abstraction and diagrammatic modeling. The danger is that engaging the analytic difficulties of Husserl's account will empty the time problem of its profundity. The question that was to lead phenomenological investigation into the most intimate core of subjectivity would instead occupy the mind with logical constructions and conceptual puzzles that fail to resonate with our unceasing sense of ourselves as living through time.

Phenomenologists, historians of modern philosophy, and philosophers of time should all benefit from de Warren's confrontation with the difficulties of time-consciousness. De Warren's study operates with an impressive density of insight at multiple levels. It explains the methodological importance of time-consciousness for Husserl's philosophical program. It clearly presents the historical developments in the questioning of time most relevant to Husserl's inheritance of the problem from Brentano. It identifies the special difficulties posed for phenomenology by the question of time, and traces one path along which Husserl made progress in resolving them. Finally, it indicates how Husserl's mature understanding of time contributes to an account of inter-subjectivity and genesis within a transcendental framework. In all of this, de Warren confronts the complexity of Husserl's descriptions without losing sight of the fact that they are meant to answer to and make comprehensible our rich awareness of being in time. This book is a bold traversal of territory scouted and surveyed by pioneers like Bernet, Brough, Held, Lohmar, Kortooms, Sokolowski and Zahavi. It is not simply an exercise in Husserl scholarship, but an original "take" on what Husserl was grappling with in thinking about time. Its lack of encyclopedic breadth in its treatment of Husserl is more than made up for in its direct articulation of a compelling, if contentious, philosophy of time.^[1]

De Warren's most forceful presentation of the methodological importance of time-consciousness for phenomenology is based on Iso Kern's three-fold approach to the transcendental phenomenological reduction.^[2] Phenomenological investigation begins with the suspension of one's belief in the existence of a transcendent world as the context in which experience of the world takes place. This suspension, for Husserl, has the capacity to reveal my own experiencing as the dimension in which everything worldly, including myself taken as a psycho-physical organism, acquires whatever meaning and validity it has. As such, experience is shown to be transcendental or world-constituting rather than empirical or mundane. Husserl's basic epistemological conviction is that if it takes shape in a method appropriate to its subject matter, reflection on the eidetic structures of transcendental experience will progressively fulfill the highest goals of philosophy as a theory of knowledge and the universe of knowable being. Following Kern's approach, the reduction to transcendental subjectivity can be formulated in both Cartesian and Kantian registers. Construed as the fulfillment of a Cartesian impulse, the reduction reveals subjectivity as an indubitable foundation for knowledge. The inerrant statement "I am thinking" refers to a dimension of immanence whose self-possession and certainty remains uncompromised by every conceivable state of affairs. The broadly Kantian formulation focuses on the accomplishments of subjectivity as the condition for world-constitution. Here, the reduction discloses "how experience is at all possible for consciousness in the form of its possible intelligibility" (28-9). In other words, it allows us to view regions of being through the meaning-bestowing acts of consciousness to which they are necessarily correlative.

De Warren's basic claim here is that these two aspects of reduction, and everything that they promise regarding a transcendental theory of knowledge, depend upon a third dimension of the reduction, the accomplishment of which requires a novel insight into time. This third formulation is influenced by Brentano. It focuses on subjectivity as concrete, self-aware experiencing (29). The return to the cogito is not reducible to an axiom because it is rooted in my self-awareness in an act of cogitating. Likewise, the conditioning of all domains of reality in the accomplishments of transcendental subjectivity does not provide rules that "legislate experience"; instead "experience is the performance, or accomplishment of consciousness" (32). To understand how subjectivity is a foundation and source of world-constitution, Husserl must capture the concrete way in which consciousness is "for itself" in its accomplishments. As de Warren points out, the being of consciousness, for Husserl, "is implicitly recognized as temporal through and through" (40); "consciousness is given to itself, or lived as an experience, in an intrinsically temporal manner" (44). In keeping with this appeal to an "implicit recognition," de Warren first advances his perspective without turning directly to the analysis of time-consciousness. Instead, he indicates the universal importance of temporality through a discussion of the synthetic and intentional character of consciousness (largely in terms of Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations). A transcendent being is displayed in an unfolding synthesis of actual and possible experiences in which an object's sense is continually enriched. The intentional and immanent synthesizing of consciousness allows us to catch sight of why time will provide the key to understanding the being of consciousness (30), as well as the "origin of the difference between . . . mind and world" (47). De Warren's approach to time through the reduction to concrete lived experience also suggests, from the beginning, that our perplexity about time is linked with our perplexity about who we are (3).

Throughout, de Warren's presentation of basic phenomenological concepts is rich in intuition and makes use of examples in a way that is fruitful, often creative, and never indulgent. The Husserl specialist will not feel subjected to a rehearsal of accepted doctrine, nor will those somewhat unfamiliar with phenomenology feel overwhelmed by a technical, empty jargon. That said, philosophers from perspectives outside the orbit of transcendental idealism will likely find that the book too easily assents to unlikely theses about the absolute nature of consciousness. De Warren does not introduce or advocate transcendental phenomenology via the problem of time, but rather addresses time as the fundamental problem of transcendental phenomenology. Having outlined the methods and themes most relevant to phenomenology's epistemological aspirations, de Warren will show how Husserl's discovery of a "transcendental absolute" in the immanent being of consciousness remains a presentiment that only attains concrete confirmation in continual explorations of time (48).

De Warren prepares us to think along with Husserl by reviewing the historical considerations that shaped Brentano's orientation toward the problem of time. Husserl's 1904/1905 lectures "On Inner Time-Consciousness" (hereafter ITC) proceed through a direct engagement with Brentano's theory of proteraesthesis (perception of the earlier-than). It is thus important to understand the historical provenance of Brentano's theory and what he hoped to accomplish with it. De Warren's reflections here are meant to clarify what is original in Husserl's contribution vis-à-vis the tradition and to identify the motivations that led Brentano to approach the vast question of time through this particular entryway. The treatments of Aristotle, Locke and Brentano himself should be read with these aims in mind. They are not full-blown explorations of what these philosophers had to say about time.

Condensing de Warren's presentations, we conclude that the most significant outcomes of Brentano's critical understanding of Aristotle and Locke are the following: a) any psychology that presupposes a lapse of time as the basis for a distinction between perception of the present and recollection of the past is inadequate because the original constitution of specific temporal modes -- lapse or succession itself -- must be accounted for; likewise, the telling of time according to physical motions presupposes an experience of now, before and after that has to be explained as a conscious accomplishment; b) in the account of the experience of succession, it is not sufficient to appeal to a present retention of what was before conscious. One must describe the modification through which the past content is apprehended as not still present; additionally, c) one faces the problem that in reflection we clearly discover our experiencing itself as a temporal event. Because accounting for the consciousness of succession via the succession of consciousness would lead to an infinite regress, it seems that the pre-reflective awareness of succession depends upon the relation of the earlier and the later in a single act of consciousness. On the basis of this critical historical understanding, Brentano tries to discover the origin of the concept of time in a form of sensibility in which the earlier-than is given along with the present (proteros ₊ aisthesis).

Within the framework of intentional psychology and its phenomenological transformation, de Warren presents an analysis of the differences between Brentano's and Husserl's theories of proteraisthesis or "primary memory." More important to de Warren's own account, however, is that we recognize a perspective from which Brentano's theory and Husserl's critique share a common shortcoming. It is in working through this initial shortcoming that Husserl will develop what de Warren considers to be his mature position. This position, in turn, will motivate de Warren to considerations and emphases of his own.

The key here is how de Warren situates both Brentano and the Husserl of the ITC lectures in relation to William Stern's 1897 essay "Mental Presence-Time," which presents a critique of the "dogma of momentary consciousness" (91-6). On the one hand, Husserl explicitly makes use of Stern in critiquing Brentano. On the other, Husserl will only accept Stern's critique into the heart of his own analysis after "unwittingly" succumbing to the dogma himself (135). Put simply, the dogma of momentary consciousness is the assumption that the act of consciousness that displays succession must contain its contents simultaneously.

Brentano's theory of primary memory roots our sense of the just-past in a modification of what is authentically given in sensible presence. The modified content, e.g. the bang I have just heard, is produced by the imagination as a non-intuitive phantasm (as opposed to the intuitive reproductions of memory) through original association with the present perception along with which it is given. This modification is automatic, irrepressible, and affects the present sensation in all its qualities. Crucially, what is now perceived and the modified just-past necessarily "form a single unity of consciousness" (86). Brentano's account of primary memory participates in the doctrine of momentary consciousness because the form of this unity is momentary simultaneity. As de Warren puts it, Brentano's is a theory of the "representation of succession in simultaneity" (91). For Brentano, "there is no perception of the present without an incidental grasp of the immediate past . . . but likewise . . . there is no perception of the immediate past, but only a perception of the momentary present" (86). In the immediacy of the perceptual now, I am aware of the just-past as a phantasm. Further, there is no original association attached to self-consciousness (86). Pre-reflective consciousness in no way experiences itself as a just-past phantasm: "the primary and secondary objects of time-consciousness -- the now and the just-now -- are encased within the simultaneity of one act of consciousness" (90).

Husserl's reaction to Brentano is presented by de Warren as an effort to attain what the neologism proteraesthesis implies. This entails recognizing that the just-past appears in perception and enjoys an "intuitive continuity with the actual now" (88). The just-past is not an imaginary reproduction that dwells like a shadow in the immediacy of the perceived present, but a modalization within the perception itself (132). Leading the reader through one of Husserl's famous diagrams of "running-off modes," de Warren introduces the three-fold intentionality (retention, primal impression, protention) by which perceptual acts constitute an unfolding time-object (as just-now, actually now, and almost-now). De Warren's analysis of this phenomenological staple is crisp and instructive. His focus is on how the co-operation of the three-fold apprehension accounts for the perception of an "in betweenness" without which musical structure, for instance, would be impossible (129). The now itself has a "transitional character," and is given "as it is running-off" (118). At any given now point, which de Warren emphasizes is a useful abstraction (122-3), just-past notes are retained (heard) as earlier in relation to the actual note. This relation of earlier and later in the unity of what is now and just-past is itself given as running off into a past of continually further displaced pasts, each with its own temporal relata:

In every now-phase within the consciousness of a time-object we have a . . . consciousness of the succession of now-phases belonging to the time object . . . as well as a consciousness of the running-off continuity of each now phase, in relation to the actual now-phase of consciousness, but also in relative relation to each elapsing now-phase within the immediate past as a whole (125).

De Warren anticipates that this double continuity will be referred not only to the time-objects displayed in perceptual acts but also, "in some sense yet to be determined" (116), to perceptual acts themselves. It seems evident that my reading of a sentence not only constitutes a phased build-up of words that itself continually contracts and sinks away into the no-longer, but that the reading itself is experienced as somehow enduring and passing. By recognizing what Stern calls the "temporal distension" of acts as they disclose the "temporal extension" of objects, Husserl challenges the dogma of momentary consciousness. Yet, according to de Warren, even in his effort to avoid the infinite regress that this challenge precipitates, Husserl will at first reintroduce the dogma at the level of absolute consciousness.

In this connection, de Warren undertakes a critique of Husserl's early apprehension-content-object theory of intentionality. We can here only bluntly indicate the concerns driving it. The dogma of simultaneity continues to undercut the genuine transcendence of the past if the constitution of temporal modes occurs through the apprehension of contents that are themselves temporally neutral, or, by default, present (135). If acts and sensa as well as objects enjoy some form of pre-reflective temporal dispersal as unfolding unities, there must be a consciousness that displays this dispersal, and the problem reemerges on a second level. Is the displaying simultaneous with what it displays? De Warren will also object to any account that avoids treating time-constituting consciousness as itself a temporal process at the cost of construing it as a non-dynamic, self-transparent, tripartite faculty of the soul (107). For de Warren, there is no static openness to time in which temporally determined unities would be constituted, but which itself would not flow -- whatever "flowing" may turn out to mean here. In a pointed formulation, he writes that "the very self-givenness of consciousness is temporal and temporary" (168). It seems that if it is genuinely temporal, a consciousness of the now/just-past cannot be entirely present to itself and its immanent content. De Warren suggests that Husserl too would remain captive to dogma if pre-reflective acts are to be arrayed as quasi-objects before the disengaged spectatorship of a time-constituting consciousness that is without internal differentiation and senses itself non-ecstatically in a standing now.^[3]

The turning point in the text consists in de Warren's effort to account for the non-simultaneity of time-consciousness through analogy with forms of experience in which consciousness is given for itself as non-present in the now. De Warren here looks to Husserl's analyses of image-consciousness, imagination and memory.^[4] The crucial insight is that in an act of imaginative seeing of X, for instance, the seeing of the imagined object as irreal is itself given as incompatible, discontinuous and non-simultaneous with my accompanying consciousness of actually imagining seeing X. De Warren speaks of a "double-consciousness" that is "contemporaneous without being simultaneous with itself" (158). I who "see" the imagined X and I who imagine I am seeing are one and the same, but are given through "the unity of consciousness as a distance within itself" (158). The quasi-seeing that is contemporaneous with my (absolute) consciousness of imagining, "is itself not present, or now, in immanent consciousness" (165). The reader will have to judge whether the careful analyses in these sections make comprehensible the paradoxical description "contemporaneous but not simultaneous."

De Warren next traces a current in Husserl's post-ITC development that admits an analogous form of non-coincidence into the core of inner time-consciousness and thus challenges "the previously unsuspected assumption that a consciousness of the past is itself present for itself" (170). His focus remains the problem of retention. De Warren will argue that the way consciousness retends itself (lengthwise intentionality) in intending its object (transverse intentionality) justifies the characterization of absolute consciousness as temporal life without reducing the consciousness of succession to the succession of consciousness. In sum, his thesis is that prior to any reflection, recollection, or indeed any discrete act of consciousness, self-awareness is a kind of ur-event involving a retention of myself as absent. De Warren's discussions of self-retention consistently play up the emptying, absenting function of retention as opposed to its "holding on" to the just-past in the present: "rather than constitute givenness in terms of presence, retention constitutes an original givenness of absence" (247). In this sense, retention is an original constitution of the past as a not-now without basis in any actually present content. The retended perceptual consciousness, for de Warren, is "de-presentified" and yet together with the originating consciousness. In a smart expression, he writes that "retentional modification and original impression are given pairwise 'at the same time' but not as the same time" (183). The double intentionality of retention thus constitutes the temporality of perceptual consciousness itself, although "in a different manner" than the temporal object it brings into view. For de Warren, inner time-consciousness constitutes itself as this double differentiation: from its object displayed in the retentional field, and of itself as absented in retention (176, 290). Husserl's metaphor of an absolute "flow" is justified because flow is equivalent to self-transcendence and differentiation: "the term 'flow' means, therefore, not duration -- something enduring or given over or in time -- but the form of always becoming other than myself" (205). In the end, de Warren will have Husserl identify the "self-appearance" of consciousness along its lengthwise intentionality with its self de-presentification (256).

Retention is always described as "working counter" to an original impression, "the well-spring of the visibility and affective force of lived-experience" (171). De Warren rightfully insists that it would be nonsensical to speak of the retention as "negating" the impression from the outside. The impression itself rather "irrupts in an interplay of retentional consciousness"; and decisively "the now is no longer than the retention of what no longer is" (171). If the retentional field is a comet's tail, there is no experience of the head as ahead. The abstract distinction between impression and retention, (actually inseparable moments in the logical sense), creates the dynamic image of a tension between a fullness of presence that is "inhibited from within" or "reversed in mid-stream" by a de-presencing inevitably occurring together with it (183). In his reading of the Bernau Manuscripts, de Warren will trace how "this tension between the poles of retentional modification and original presentation" is "displaced onto the poles of retention and protention" (199). Husserl now explicitly conceives the original impression as a fulfillment of protentional consciousness. Once impression is conceived as fulfillment, de Warren emphasizes the "absolute novelty" by virtue of which the arriving now "always surpasses our expectation." There is an "alterity of the new" that "interrupts from within . . . in such a manner that consciousness cannot recuperate itself entirely despite its own accomplishment in the folding and unfolding of temporality" (218). Indeed, de Warren's downplaying of fulfillment leads him to characterize absolute consciousness as my being retentionally too late for myself (already having escaped myself), surpassed by myself in the novelty of the now (surprising myself as origin), and protentionally too early for myself (expecting myself as what I am not) (255-8). This thoroughgoing self-transcending in time is "the movement of life itself, not the failure of consciousness to coincide with itself but rather the success of missing itself in such a way that consciousness remains open to itself and the world" (259).

Let us here introduce two critical considerations. First, briefly, de Warren's strong emphasis on the emptying, withholding and forgetting functions of retention would seem to cause difficulties in understanding its constitutive role in the disclosure of transcendent time-objects. The clarity and vivacity of an unfolding melody or sentence seems to take shape in the thickness of the retentional field itself. Perhaps this distinction is recognized in de Warren's constant warning that retention does not retend its time-object "in the same manner" as it does immanent consciousness of that object. Second, and more generally, the reader may wonder whether de Warren gives a satisfactory account of why the original consciousness of inner-time should not entail an experience of ceaseless self-fulfillment or self-becoming as fundamentally as one of self-alteration and missing. As we saw above, de Warren interprets the self-accomplishment of consciousness in the folding and unfolding of time as the subordinate clause, the "despite" of time-consciousness. Why? And what is this folding and unfolding that would suggest self-possession? The key to posing this problem within Husserl's framework might lie in drawing out the consequences of protention's involvement in the self-constitution of the "flow" of absolute consciousness. As de Warren himself notes, in addition to foreshadowing the content of the almost-now on the basis of retentions, protention also protends the running-off modes as yet further sunken away as well as the abiding openness of the protentional horizon as such (197, 199). The necessity of retentional modification in consciousness is not a blind law, but itself given in the form of anticipated fulfillment. If it is legitimate to base existential conclusions about "myself" upon time as the most fundamental medium of my life, shouldn't this movement of "general fulfillment"^[5] motivate conclusions that would balance those de Warren gleans from the self-missing of time-consciousness?

In the final third of his text, de Warren cashes in his emphasis on the de-presentation at the heart of pre-reflective self-awareness in a number of ways. In a remarkably economic critique, he argues that the Derridian deconstruction of transcendental subjectivity in Husserl depends upon a basic misunderstanding of time-consciousness. Most crucially, Derrida construes retention as a restitution of presence (and in this sense similar to recollection) whereas we learn from de Warren that it is primarily a de-presentification that accompanies and reverses original presentation in "mid-stream." De Warren's argument against entertaining an external "threat" to the immanence of consciousness is essentially that it is already "broken from within" (268). Perhaps of more general interest will be the account of the transcendence of Others that de Warren's treatment of time makes possible. The link between the problems of time and the Other is that they both engage the basic epistemic goals of phenomenology in regard to the problem of what is irreducible to self-presence. As with time, so with the Other: "the challenge is to understand the givenness of absence without undermining the phenomenological adherence to the original givenness of presence, or evidence, as the foundation for all constitution" (215). In an incisive reading of the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, de Warren shows how the presence of alterity of the other is required by phenomenology's endeavor to account for the being of an objective world. The highlight here is his provocative suggestion that appresentation of the Other is best understood as exhibiting a "headless temporality" where retentions lack a "stabilizing center in the arc of my living presence" (248). Because such retentions were never originally present for me, they cannot bear a telos to fulfillment in recollection. Hence, "no demand is made on the Other to be given as itself and this restraint is a novel form of transcendence and constitution" (249). The book concludes by indicating how the study of time-consciousness, which clarifies the event of phenomenality at a level where "nothing yet happens," prepares the analysis of subjectivity in its concrete becoming as an egological monad (275). Topics here include the constitution of possibility and actuality, potentiality, and associative synthesis.

De Warren's text is a densely woven fabric that incorporates a broad range of phenomenological themes. Where it is not systematic, it is suggestive, and will serve as an invitation to further reflection.

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^[1] De Warren does not directly interpret the material on time collected in the C-manuscripts, nor does he trace each shift in Husserl's developing positions over the years. The interested reader might consult Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegendwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). For a more recent study that carefully documents Husserl's shifting positions and also includes an account of C-manuscript material, see Toine Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time: Edmund Husserl's Analysis of Time-Consciousness (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). These limits of de Warren's text, which he himself acknowledges, do not diminish its success on its own terms.

^[2] Iso Kern, "The Three Ways to the Transcendental Reduction in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl," in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. P. McCormick and F. Ellison (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1977), pp. 126-149. Kern refers to the third path as the way through intentional psychology.

^[3] For a recent Husserlian attempt to identify the heart of pre-reflective consciousness with a non-temporal, even eternal, awareness of time, see J. G. Hart, Who One Is, Book 1: Meontology of the "I": A Transcendental Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 429-438. De Warren never seriously entertains the idea that the awareness of time might be founded in an experience of eternity.

^[4] Here, de Warren draws on both the Bernau Manuscipts (Husserliana XXXIII) and Husserl's investigations into Phantasie, Bildbewustsein and Erinnerung collected in Husserliana XXIII.

^[5] For a discussion of general fulfillment and particular fulfillment in protentional consciousness as presented in the Bernau Manuscripts, see the aforementioned work of Toine Kortoom, Phenomenology of Time, pp. 158-174.