Conceptions and Misconceptions of Consciousness
Ralph Barton Perry
Were the use of the term consciousness to be forbidden for a season, contemporary thought would be set the wholesome task of discovering more definite terms with which to replace it, and a very considerable amount of convenient mystery would be dissipated. There is no philosophical term at once so popular and so devoid of standard meaning. How can a term mean anything when it is employed to connote anything and everything, including its own negation ? One hears of the object of consciousness and the subject of consciousness, and the union of the two in self-consciousness ; of the private consciousness, the social consciousness, and the transcendental consciousness ; the inner and the outer, the higher and the lower, the temporal and the eternal consciousness ; the activity and the state of consciousness. Then there is consciousness-stuff, and unconscious consciousness, called respectively mind-stuff for short, and unconscious psychical states or subconsciousness to avoid a verbal contradiction. This list is not complete, but sufficiently amazing. Consciousness comprises everything that is, and indefinitely much more. It is small wonder that the definition of it is little attempted. One of the most successful efforts is that of Professor Ladd, who regards consciousness as the difference (presumably from the sleeper's point of view) between waking and dreamless sleep. This is equivalent to the difference between more or less of something, and nothing at all ; which is quite accurately true to current usage. Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy defines consciousness, on the one hand, as ' the distinctive character of whatever may be called mental life,' and mind, on the other hand, as 'the indi-
( 283) -vidual's conscious process, together with the dispositions and predispositions which condition it.' But it is more customary to say frankly that the term is indefinable. If it were taken for granted that it is therefore better left unemployed in exact thinking, there would be no occasion for objection. But its indefinability is more commonly attributed to the profoundness of its meaning. Indeed the definition of being in terms of consciousness is set down as the surviving and most illuminating truth of philosophy. The hope is expressed that we may now postulate it and proceed to more debatable matters. And consciousness so regarded as the fundamental ontological truth, is called upon to carry and protect man's moral and religious interests. Especially in the nineteenth century has this term suffered the taint of eulogy, through being made the watch-word of nonmaterialism. The advocates of the spiritual man, never overscrupulous in their choice of weapons, have in this case been willing to confound the enemy by confusing him. ' What are you going to do with consciousness?' asks the idealist. The materialist, not knowing precisely what it is, but convinced that it bears no resemblance to a motion or a secretion, does nothing
with it. Whereupon the idealist shows him what he can do with matter, and the materialist, who is a stupid adversary at best, takes refuge in a general protest against metaphysics. The defeat of materialism is not to be regretted, but there must be no uncritical acceptance of the victor. The term consciousness as at present employed is too reminiscent of this controversy. It stands for a general propaganda, which runs some-
( 284) what as follows : psychology and transcendental logic disprove materialism, seat God on his throne, and prove the immortality of the soul. When one ceases to look upon then from the standpoint of the counter-thesis of materialism, these are impossible allies. Consciousness cannot mean everything and yet mean anything. As a name for the psychological aspect of experience, it may be shown to mean something definite and important ; but consciousness so interpreted is confused and misconceived when called upon to serve as a metaphysical account of being, and is no safeguard of man's spiritual interests. Consideration of morality and religion will be omitted from the present discussion, which will attempt first to account for and define a concept of consciousness, and second to criticise its metaphysical use.
Only a successful analysis can justify the proposal to account for this concept in terms of psychological experiences, the more so since the term ' psychological' must be defined at the same time. But the arbitrariness of the procedure is at a minimum when we begin where the race and the individual have presumably begun to learn of these matters. Before a certain moment in the development of reflection the self is theoretically indistinguishable from body, and conceptions of it throw no light on the idea of consciousness ; while after that moment the self is conceived with definite reference to a specific type of experience which has come to be noted and differentiated. That which makes this difference between the early cosmological, and the later radical or critical conceptions of the self, is the distinct employment of a set of ideas signifying seeming or appearance. While primitive experience is entirely free from any general idea of the dependence of objects upon the knowing of them, there are certain accepted cases in which an experience is definitely recognized as my experience, or certain facts which are regarded as deriving existence from a for-me relation. This is a very different idea from that of the functioning of the sense-organs. That I see and hear and taste is a commonplace of all experience, and I may study what I see, or the manner of my seeing, without effecting any discontinuity in my practical or scientific world of things. But to believe that what I
( 285) see is constituted by my seeing of it, is to define a new realm, an anomalous science, and possibly a new philosophical method. Such a belief must arise very early in connection with discredited or illusory experiences. Illusions so vivid as dreams are doubtless in the beginning often regarded as unusually significant experiences of objects, but such can scarcely be the case with all dreams, with fever-deliriums, and with wanderings and inventings of the imagination. And these adventures are homogeneous with certain very familiar and normal happenings. Experience is constantly correcting itself and discrediting its earlier content. Observation and identification is a process of self-correction. The surviving judgment is the last of a series of discarded judgments which were once as living as itself. They are not the object A, but ' what I thought,' the way it seemed to me then,' my mistake, or confusion. To be sure, such retrospect is not demanded for the direct purpose of observation or identification, but they cannot altogether escape the notice even of the man of affairs. They tend, as in the case of the double images, to be neglected because not important. They become important, however, whenever the task of thinking becomes specialized, and interest is aroused in conditions that tend to determine its success or failure. Error and confusion come then to be attended to, and designated as a realm of idiosyncracy, to he corrected or repudiated by the wise man. The appearance of these ideas in early Greek philosophy is familiar history. They determine the common distinction between ' truth ' and ' opinion'; and the Protagorean doctrine is an inference from them. The aspect of experience recog-
( 286) -nized in this old epistemological criticism has played an important part in modern philosophy, where it appears notably in Spinoza's conception of modality and inadequate ideas, in Kant's manifold of the internal sense, and in Hegel's doctrine of subjective spirit. It furnishes the most likely definition of the field of psychology, and with reference to its bearing upon this problem, let us consider the analysis independently of its history.
The first intent or bearing of experience is objective, as expressed in the judgment, that is A. But experience proves to be self-corrective. The content of A grows in the direction of its own completeness. A is in the first instance more or less problematical, and increases in articulateness. While the direction or interest remains the same, this experience is homogeneous, an experience, we say, of the same thing, or context of things. But an act of attention is possible whereby the direction is reversed. With this new interest there now appears a series of corrected experiences, to any degree of inadequacy. These specific limitations may be noted and attributed to specific conditions. In this wise the corrected and replaced experience, in contradiction to the corrective experience, is viewed as merely my experience, a term of my blindness and struggle. Since I have now apprehended the thing itself, I can define my more or less successful purpose with reference to the thing. In ordinary experience I have my face to reality and my back to such of the
(287) cognitive process as I have passed by. But I may turn and behold the way I have come, together with its stages ; and these latter I now denominate Joints of view in contradiction to that which may be so viewed. Such is the psychical fact and the reflection required for the identification of it. Let us turn to the consideration of examples.
The most unequivocal instance is the dream. This is a definite type of invalid experience, recognized as such from the standpoint of a valid corrective experience. Were there only dreaming, there would be no dreaming. Either I must myself awake or have my illusions observed by another, who both knows them and knows beyond them. The waking and the dreaming differ in that the former not only succeeds the latter, but includes and replaces it ; while the latter on the other hand knows nothing of the former. The waking experience defines my dreaming, and in the presence of the real judges it to be unreal. When I wake up to the actual situation, my dreaming takes on the duller hues of a subjectivity and fancy which I significantly call my own.
There is a similar distinction between the narratives of the historian and the eye-witness. The historian corrects the experiences of the eye-witness by marshalling contemporaneous events and by eliminating the more accidental sequences and coincidences of observation. In view of the real order of events, the uncritical report of an individual may be circumscribed and identified as such. A continuous series of maps of . the battle-ground, with the formations and movements of the combatants, would so include and transcend the order of occurrence in the experience of a soldier of the ranks.
Let us turn to those instances that are due to the deliberate psychological interest. The need both of an included and of a supervening experience is here determinative of a method, and is most clearly in evidence in the case of comparative and experimental research. The experience of the animal, child, savage, or abnormal subject, is viewed as within a valid world of experience, and interpreted in terms of specific and characteristic limiting conditions. In experiment these limiting conditions are in part artificially provided, and with them is
( 288) coördinated the report of the subject, the whole being contained in the presumably or practically unlimited experience of the investigator.
But lastly let us consider the more crucial case of introspection, and in particular, introspective attention to perception. How is the psychological manifold differentiated from the thingmanifold where there are no social relations involved? The possibility of it is clear, the manner of it obscure. I can analyze my perceiving on the one hand and the object of my perceiving on the other with quite different results, and yet in the perception they are indistinguishable. The difference must lie in my interest, of in the direction of my attention, and it appears here also that one interest is fundamentally determinative. Indeed, the method is essentially identical with the judgment, ' I have been dreaming,' except that in this case the invalidity of the corrected experience is less radical. Introspection is retrospective attention to an experience which I now surround and surmount. That more or less complete apprehension which can now become a distinct manifold for me because I compare it with the occasion itself, I call my state. The actual method employed in this type of investigation is commonly hidden on account of the rapid alternation of interests. My objective experience is constantly awaking from new dreams. I must oscillate rapidly between the standpoints of experimenter and subject. From my standpoint as experimenter, my experience as subject is the relatively inadequate experience whose boundaries I may now view retrospectively and whose limiting conditions I endeavor to analyze. Consider the case of my perception of a house, which tends to reveal to me its true geometrical form, together with the totality of its exterior and interior. In ordinary experience I have it so present to me ; practically, as is attested by my dealings with it, and theoretically, as is attested by my description of it to another. But I may compare with this valid experience the inadequacies which are contained and compensated for within it. My corrected spatial perspective would constitute such an inadequacy, and I may analyze this as respects its content, and as respects the manner and the means wherewith the correction is made. In such procedure the house has
( 289) been regarded as the culminating event in a process of mind, and the factors determined by such an analysis are called states of mind. This interpretation of the method of introspection might be further and more readily illustrated with reference to imagination and memory. The same method holds in the case of feeling, this psychical factor appearing in the experience, I want or like A, in contradistinction to the experience, A is good. Feeling is an invalid judgment of worth. In each case the field of psychology comes into view only when an incomplete experience is recognized as such from the standpoint of an experience regarded as objective. The corrected or discredited experience so determined critically in an experience of things, is regarded as merely my experience, and may be analyzed as such. But we must have passed beyond the psychical to become aware of it. These psychical data cannot be called things or reals in the same sense as the standard objects, for they are completed and replaced by the latter. We therefore provide a radically different category for them, and recognize that their content is common to themselves and to things, while their specific character is given them by their limitations and context.
Accepting for the present this definition of consciousness in terms of relativity, let us examine the attempt to construe it as a philosophy. Such a theory might properly be designated as psychological idealism, and is known under the names of perceptual idealism, phenomenalism and sensationalism. This theory arises from the thought of the possibility of indefinitely extending the psychological manifold. Every corrective experience may, and tends to become in turn, a corrected experience. There is no experience of which one may not come to say, ' it is my state,' or, ' ft is your state.' " At first sight," says Walter Pater, who styles himself a new Cyrenaic, "experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence ; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic ; each object is loosed into a group of impressions-colours, odour, tex-
( 290) -ture---in the mind of the observer. * * * Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of these impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." On such grounds one reaches the generalization that every knowable object is someone's perception, or the more radical persuasion that every knowable object is his own perception. The only definable being is seeming. In terms of the above analysis, this is equivalent to the proposition that everything so far as knowledge is concerned is invalid experience. To assert this proposition is, of course, to plead scepticism. But even as scepticism it is not tenable, since it is a criticism of experience according to a principle. There can he no experience of a world in which each mind keeps ' as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.' The Protagorean mind must itself have awakened and broken from its prison. Madame Ackermann is quoted as saying: " My last word will be: ' I have been dreaming.' " But in that moment she will at last have ceased to dream. Relativism will not do as a doctrine, though it may serve as an apology for silence. And where the Protagorean principle has been asserted, it has almost invariably been associated with a deeper metaphysics calculated to make this principle itself a psychological one. In the case of Protagoras himself, the world was conceived with Heraclitus and Democritus as essentially motion. Perception is itself a type of motion, and so incapable of fixing upon permanent being. But motion itself is otherwise and distinctly conceived, so that perception is defined in terms of being, and as within a world. Such is clearly the case with all definitions of the perceptual realm in terms of so-called ' secondary qualities.' Where the motive of the physical sciences is the determining one, and this is very commonly the case, the world gets itself divided into the physical and the psychological realms, the former being
(291) employed as the standard and defining world. And here a subsequent reduction of knowledge to psychological terms is evidently contradictory.
The perceptual idealism of Berkeley announces subjectivity as an ontological, and not merely an epistemological principle. The famous dictum, ' esse est percipi,' is the ontological counterpart of the more ancient dictum, 'Panton crhmaton metron anqropoz.' But it appears shortly that to be is rather to perceive, or to cause to perceive. The soul and God are the real terms of the perceptual relation, and they are themselves revealed in another order of cognition. Berkeley's later tendency to abandon his perceptual idealism for one of the Platonic type is well-known, and emphasizes his inability to make an objective order out of the psychological realm. But he persisted in this course so far that he made content and subjectivity coextensive, and was then under the necessity of adding the objectivity all at once and abstractly. The same necessity is interestingly exhibited in the case of J. S. Mill, whose category of ' possible experience' functions similarly as objectivity conceptually and artificially superadded to a content that has been stripped of it.
Sensationalism in its other modern and contemporary phases scarcely warrants serious treatment. It commonly defines sensations as events within a physical world, and then gravely announces that these sensations, as the simplest terms of introspective analysis, are the ultimate beings. But the perfection of this contradiction is enlightening. The sensation is the quintessence of relativity. It signifies objectivity at a minimum and subjectivity at a maximum. Simple pressure, or the lonely and unrecognized sound, are the first dawning or the last waning of objects. But they are such vanishing points only in the light of their all but entire inadequacy. In themselves these pulses of experience are objective, and are remarkable only when we come to consider the great degree of their deficiency. Sensationalism means the attempt to define being in terms of what it is not. Indeed, such a plan is virtually announced in the language of all relativists. The Protagorean proposition stated ontologically would read : all things are the human measure of them, which contains the same substitution of a
( 292) passive for an active or neuter verb that is remarkable in the Berkeleyan principle. But any account of being in terms of another than itself is as unprofitable as it is contradictory.
The transcendental idealist would doubtless regard the discussion up to this point as a stage in the development of his own argument, and he must now be reckoned with quite independently. His doctrine is established with direct critical reference to psychological idealism. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity is allowed to conduct the thinker dialectically to the conception of the absolute. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or inclusiveness. The outcome of this dialectic is determined by the symmetry of the antithesis. Corrected experience implies a last correcting experience ; partial cognition, complete cognition ; empirical subject, a transcendental subject ; finite mind, an absolute mind. Hence being is definable as for a standard, complete, transcendental or absolute consciousness. Now it is evident that the validity of this reasoning depends upon the degree to which the limiting adjective determines the meaning of the substantive. If consciousness means limitation, then absolute consciousness is a phrase but not an idea. Where consciousness is recognized as relative, what does it mean apart from that relativity? This question has remained unanswered so far as transcendentalism. is concerned. But if consciousness known as experience relative to a point of view, is not defined save in terms of that circumscription, then to retain the concept of consciousness for a realm defined as free from just that factor of circumscription, is sheer absurdity.
Let us consider briefly the Kantian foundation of transcendentalism. The Critique of Pure Reason taken as a whole, informs us that the object, so far at any rate as knowable, can be neither inside nor outside of my private consciousness. The dilemma is solved by defining the object as apperceived by a transcendental ego which is the ideal cognitive subject logically immanent in my consciousness. This subject remains for Kant a law of my consciousness and thus dwells in that logical realm which is neither soul nor nature, until it enters into the real world under the form of faith. But its
( 293) relation to the realm of knowledge is such as to define nature as phenomenal on the ground that it falls between the unthought world on the one hand, and the completely thought world on the other; between the residual objectivity of the perceptual experience, and the ideal objectivity of the conceptual experience. There is too much or not enough of consciousness in the natural world to permit of its being a world of things ; too much because space and time are merely subjective necessities, and too little because these forms of perception are such as prevent the realization of the ideal of subjectivity itself. The phenomenal realm is distinguished from such a realm as would have its being independently of thought, and such a realm as would have its being in the perfection of thought. So far as theory is in question Kant leaves us here. For the post-Kantian who wishes to define a metaphysical doctrine, there are two possibilities. He may conceive that successful thought ceases to be distinguishable as thought, and therefore realizes being as independent of thought ; or he may conceive that successful thought is still essentially thought and therefore realizes only its own consummation. Kant's phrase ' intelligible intuition ' permits either interpretation ; the former is the way of realism of the Platonic type, the latter the way of post-Kantian idealism. But the only account of mind that is offered even by the idealist is an account in terms of its practical function with reference to the things which it seeks to evisage. As in Kant's delimitation of the realm of the internal sense as psychological, the realm of physical or external experience becomes for the moment a realm of things ; so in any delimitation of the phenomenal world as a whole, the noumenal world becomes a realm of things. Now if I define my real world to escape my subjectivity why should I call it my transcendental self? Kant himself refused to do it when lie maintained that the logical subject, or transcendental ego, was not a real. I might as well call it an objective subject, or an absolute relative. The contradiction is only thinly disguised in the common language of idealism. This theory finds no difficulty in an absolute joint of view (or Absolute's point of view), as though anything absolute could be a point of view at all. To transcend my point
(294) of view, I am to employ a transcendent point of view. Since in knowledge I must escape subjectivity, I resort to a supreme subject. It is like defining riches as transcendental poverty, or satiety as transcendental hunger. Suppose an orifice through which light shines upon a wall : the disk is then due to the orifice. Remove the orifice, and the generally diffused light is due, according to the transcendental idealist, to a transcendental orifice.
But possibly we do this type of idealism an injustice through not advancing in its behalf the direct and positive argument for consciousness in consideration of its synthetic function. This argument is sufficiently obscure to make one fearful of stating it in behalf of another ; but it seems to mean that truth is a gathering up, systematizing, or relating of terms, and that such is exclusively the property of thought. Now I may see the logical evidence for a connection without seeing any evidence for the dependence of that connection upon my seeing. My judgment does not attest its own indispensableness. Only a later judgment can so define my first judgment as a judgment at all. The judgment so discovered has, moreover, an individuality or numerical uniqueness that forbids the definition of its object in terms of it. Were the triangle constituted by the defining thought of it, there would be a triangle for every such judgment, but no such thing as a triangle. That truth is a synthetic activity of thought must be a psychological truth, i. e., it has reference to my access to truth rather than to truth itself. It is biographically true that when I apprehend a law, or principle or definition, I comprehend a number of terms together and in relation. I reach the truth by combining, as, notably, in the case of my knowledge of similarity. But it would be folly to claim that therefore things are made similar by their combination in my experience. Things are not made similar by seeming similar. In seeming similarity there is doubtless a peculiar unity. Two similar seemings will not make a seeming similarity. But this has to do with the peculiar relational character of the psychical manifold, and not with the truth of similarity. It is true, of course, that a succession of feelings is not a feeling of succession, but this does not point at all to the
( 295) dependence of the former upon the latter. It is the transcendentalist's favorite complaint against the empiricist that lie confuses psychology with logic, but his own arguments for idealism turn upon this very confusion. His psychology of thought is an improvement upon the crude associational theory, but they are none the less psychology. And in the metaphysical use of his theory he identifies the object of knowledge with the knowing. He makes being out of the psychology of logic, and by a dialectic that is in this respect essentially indistinguishable from that of the sensationalist, he defines the real in terms of that activity, purposiveness, or category of objectivity which he regards as the most important factor of the knowing state. Indeed, he quite frankly acknowledges that metaphysics and psychology coincide in the conception of the self. There is space here for only a brief independent consideration of this conception, but sufficient to do justice to its serviceableness as a general ontological principle.
Self-consciousness is introduced to terminate the series of relativities defined by a perceptual idealism. If A be for B, B for C, and C for D, there must eventually be an M, such that while A, B, C and D are for M, Mis for itself. The difficulty here centers in the proposition, ' A is for itself,' which for our critical purposes we may treat in a purely dialectical manner. If there be no difference between M and ' itself' there can be no relation between them except that of identity, M is M, which is the category of the thing. If M and ' itself' are not alike, then M1 is for M, and the original perceptual series is prolonged interminably, or M1 - M2 must be regarded as a unique and organic relationship itself constitutive of a new thing N, which itself does not derive existence from relation to a mind. So we must either content ourselves with a world that is phenomenal and face the contradiction that is virtually contained in such a proposition, or consent sooner or later to regard the terminus of thought as a thing not constituted by that thought. And such a consent is in reality prior both temporally and logically to the conception of subjectivity. The error here is substantially the same as that which lies at the root of the other two transcendentalist arguments ; the terms of psychology are mis-
( 296) -applied to a totality of which by definition they signify only an abstracted aspect. The term consciousness has reference to relativity and exclusion within a world of reals, and therefore cannot signify a principle constitutive of that world itself.
It is the chief interest of faith that certain values shall survive and be consummated. If consciousness be either a specific and unique kind of thing, as certain so-called ' spiritualistic ' philosophers would have us believe, or a general form of all being, it cannot be centrally important in such an issue. But if taken to signify selection within the realm of things, then, though it cannot be the ontological first principle, yet as the most general category defining a self it will apply either to psychology or the religious aspect of metaphysics. It must be admitted that error is an outstanding problem. But that circumstance is at least equally difficult for the subjective idealist. Grant him his absolute subject, and finite experiences with their relativity and exclusiveness are a totally new problem, which the general and innocuous pervasiveness of consciousness does nothing to solve.