Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer

By David Berman

The title is meant to indicate that consciousness is being examined largely within the history of philosophy, and within the period of time from Descartes to Ayer. 

Investigators aiming to understand consciousness and minds usually try to take account of all individual human minds, so as to have the most data for  the most encompassing induction.  The problem with that approach is that because of the vastness of the data, its results tend to be vague, lacking the specificity of studies of individuals.  On the other hand, the problem with studies of individuals is that they cannot guarantee generality, as the opposing method can.  

This book's distinctive approach aims at a middle way, getting the best of the two opposing methods by drawing its data from the history of philosophy, especially the history of the great philosophers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030809218

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

D. BermanConsciousness from Descartes to Ayerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80921-8_1

1. The Theory of 2 Consciousnesses

David Berman¹  

(1)

Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

David Berman

Email: [e-mail]

1 Introduction and Summary

Two persons looking into a field can each say ‘I see the brown cow’ and be conscious of the cow they see. And as there is one thing they see and are talking about, namely the cow, it is assumed that their respective consciousness is also the same. This, very briefly, is what I call the Assumption: that there is one basic kind of consciousness which all human beings have. It is this Assumption which I reject. For the truth, I argue, is that there are two basic kinds of human consciousness, one which is monistic, the other dualistic. I call this the 2 Consciousnesses Theory- or, for short, 2CT. My aim in this chapter is to make clear both the Assumption and the 2CT, and to explain why the former should be rejected and the latter accepted. To do this, I move in different sections between the Assumption and the 2CT, going deeper and deeper into each, providing more and more detail about each and why one is false and the other is true.

Here I might begin by observing that the Assumption can also be expressed by saying that there is one basic kind of thinking or experience or awareness or subjectivity or mentation, which all human beings have. For there are many terms which are and have been used to refer to what is now generally called consciousness.

And there are also various reasons and causes why the Assumption has been accepted- why it has been taken to be evidently true. Some of these are presented in Sect. 2, followed by my primary reason for holding that the Assumption is false and the 2CT is true. This is that the 2CT is shown to be true by the history of philosophy. Thus looking at the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, we find Descartes, Leibnitz and Berkeley confidently presenting consciousness as taking a dualistic form; whereas Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume confidently presenting consciousness as monistic. And this is also what we find in ancient philosophy, where the dualistic is asserted by Anaxagoras and especially Plato, and the monistic by Democritus and Epicurus, among others. And the opposition is also to be found in more recent philosophy, with monists, such as Bradley and Ryle, and dualists such McTaggart and Moore.

However, there is a form of consciousness, which, unlike the monistic and dualistic, all human beings do have in common. But it is neither basic nor natural. Rather, it is an understanding or awareness in language, which human beings are taught, and which is the sine qua non for living in society. Hence it seems right to describe it as socio-linguistic. So all human beings can say, either aloud or silently: ‘I see the brown cow’, or ‘I feel tired’ or ‘I have a toothache’. But this socio-linguistic mode of consciousness is not either natural or basic, as are the monist and dualist forms of consciousness. For language is acquired through nurture, as is clearly shown in the development of babies, who, from being pre-linguistic learn language, and so become socio-linguistic persons. And this acquired mode of consciousness can be lost, as is shown in extreme dementia. But while pre-linguistic babies, and those suffering from extreme dementia, do not have it, they do always have, according to the 2CT, either the monistic or dualistic forms of consciousness. Thus if the pre-linguistic infant Descartes experienced painful thirst, his experience would be of two distinct things: (1) himself in thirsty pain and (2) an object which would be his painful thirst. Whereas for a monist, like Hume, his pre-linguistic, infant experience would be of only one kind of thing, what Hume called perceptions, so only painful thirst perceptions, with no distinct perceiver of those perceptions.

Before passing on to Sect. 2, I should also observe that, according to our main theory, there is a close connection between consciousness and self. So just as I hold there are two basic forms of consciousness, I also hold there are two basic types of self- the monistic and dualistic- which underlie the two forms of consciousness. Hence there are really two Assumptions, one relating to the self, the other to consciousness. However, for simplicity, I have in this chapter focused on the Assumption relating to consciousness.

2 The Assumption and the 2CT

Why has the Assumption been accepted by everyone, including all scientists, psychologists and philosophers? One main reason is because human beings are known to be basically the same physically. Hence it is assumed that they are basically the same inwardly or mentally, in their consciousness. There is also the principle of economy which rightly directs us not bring in more than one element if one is sufficient. And the Assumption has seemed sufficient, as is shown in the fact that it has not hitherto been seriously questioned. Supposing that there is just one human form of consciousness also makes sense of our human ability for cooperative action, which we don’t have with other species to the same extent. These, then, are some of the reasons or causes which have made the Assumption appear so evident.

To be sure, it is generally accepted that we cannot be certain that the way each of us is conscious is the same as even one other person. For it is generally agreed that no one can directly experience the consciousness of another human being. Why not? Because we cannot get directly into the mind of another person to know what his or her consciousness is like and whether it is like our own. But we can, with great assurance, infer what it is like. How? By listening to what other people say about their consciousness. And doesn’t everything we hear and read confirm that there is only one form of consciousness, and so that the Assumption is true?

No, not everything! For there is one important area where we find disagreement. This is the history of philosophy, where, as mentioned above, we encounter some philosophers holding that consciousness is basically monistic and others that it is dualistic.

To be sure, at any one time there has usually been a consensus on what it is. And the present consensus, which has been gaining ground since the late nineteenth century, is that consciousness is monistic, that it is a complex form of matter. So it is now generally agreed that consciousness- what all humans have- is monistic. But what the history of philosophy shows is that the consensus has not always been in favour of monism, for in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the consensus was in favour of dualism. And it is important to note that even the dualists, who dissent from the present consensus, still accept the Assumption, only believing that the present consensus is mistaken. From this alone it should be clear that in attacking the Assumption I am attacking a position that is accepted universally.

Yet the history of philosophy goes directly against the Assumption. And here I should add that up to the nineteenth century, before psychology split from philosophy, the history of philosophy included the history of psychology. So what this large history shows is that, as against the present consensus in favour of materialistic monism, many philosophers have believed that consciousness is dualistic, according to which it consists in two basic things, namely an immaterial mind experiencing material objects. This was the position inaugurated by Descartes in his Meditations, published in 1641, which remained the consensus until the early nineteenth century. Although I should mention that it was quickly challenged by Hobbes and Gassendi, then later by Spinoza, then questioned by Locke later in the seventeenth century, when the dualistic consensus began to wane somewhat, as it did increasingly in the eighteenth century under the influence of other monists, most importantly Hume, but even more under the influence of Kant’s innovative philosophy, and other philosophers following his lead in the nineteenth century, such as Hegel and Schopenhauer.

So it is specifically through the discipline of the history of philosophy- which I take to be a sub-division of philosophy in much the same way as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics- that the 2CT can be supported and the Assumption called into question. For the history of philosophy clearly shows that both dualism and monism are taken with equal seriousness by philosophers. So neither one nor the other can be given primacy over the other by a serious historian of philosophy, for then his history would not be regarded as objective history of philosophy but as being tendentiously committed to one or the other position- so really a work of substantive metaphysics or epistemology, although written in the historical mode.

To be sure, the history of philosophy differs from the other sub-divisions of philosophy in having a more factual basis. And it is because of this, no doubt, that there is far more agreement in it than in the other sub-disciplines, such as metaphysics or epistemology. And what we find in the history of philosophy is that there are fundamental oppositions, not only on the nature of consciousness, but on other basic issues, such as free will vs determinism, naturalism vs non-naturalism in ethics, etc.