The Life of the Mind
by Hannah ArendtHarcourt, originally published 1971
p30 The discussion here of the primacy of appearance can, I think, be read a little differently than the author intended in this Age of the Kardashians. Or maybe not, really. Certainly at a superficial level nothing is more important in our culture than mere appearance. Being is fine in its place, but appearance is going to gain more screen views and clicks. In this regard popular culture is very like the culture of birds. And this isn't only a recent development.
7 Reality and the thinking ego: the Cartesian doubt and the sensus communis
p45 This is where I get to calibrate, and it's not looking good. Given that Arendt claims that she, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Pont are all on the same page re: Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." I have to admit I'm not exactly standing on bedrock here myself when I argue in opposition.
What does confuse me is that Descartes and Kant were really on the same side here. I maintain that Descartes was fine with his first step, but immediately went to hell after that. Arendt and (I'm assuming the others) seem to have quibbles from the perspective of "pure reason." Which I admit I'm not following.
At least Arendt gets immediately to solipsism, indicating she understands what he was going on about, which has not always been the case in my experience when people parse Descartes. The one thing Descartes got right (in my opinion) is that thinking is the one thing we can't doubt. We can doubt everything having to do with sense perception and memory, but we can't doubt that we are thinking about all this.
Everything that follows, or that Descartes wants to believe follows from, "Je pence, doc je suis," is rhetorical BS of a quality that no doubt stimulated the German thinkers to try to somehow equal the Gallic flow.
I'm going to ignore her bodyguard of famous names, and go with her own attack on Descartes,
p48 ...So strong was the experience of the thinking activity itself, on the one hand, so passionate on the other the desire to find certainty and some sort of abiding permanence after the new science had discovered "la terre mouvante" (the shifting quicksand of the very ground on which we stand), that it never occurred to him that no cogitatio and no cogito me cogitare, no consciousness of an acting self that had suspended all faith in the reality of its intentional objects, would ever have been able to convince him of his own reality had he actually been born in a desert, without a body and its senses to perceive "material" things and without fellow-creatures to assure him that what he perceived was perceived by them too. The Cartesian res cogitans, this fictitious creature, bodiless, senseless, and forsaken, would not even know that there is such a thing as reality and a possible distinction between real and the unreal, between the common world of waking life and the private non-world of our dreams...
I'll admit that a hard-core solipsistic position exists almost entirely as a philosophical thought experiment. (The pantheistic -- Dream of Devi -- alternative is at least logically plausible and, I think, the best way to consider Arendt's attack here.) In the Dream of Devi scenario, all that Arendt has said in the book so far about "appearance" and "seeming" and "being" takes place in a "reality" of thought. Arendt is criticizing Descartes based on the "realities" of a "physical existence" (that we experience with our very suspect sense organs and brains) that is itself under debate.
And it's really annoying being put in the position of having to defend Descartes.
It's also odd that she sites Kant but not David Hume when assaulting Descartes. I'm guessing that Kant is just doing a little destructive foundation work before building his own reality (or at least "thing-in-itself") affirming structure.
She actually starts this section with Husserl, which I need to return to,
p45 ...Husserl's basic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality of all acts of consciousness, that is, the fact that no subjective arc is ever without an object: though the seen tree may be an illusion, for the the act of seeing it is an object nevertheless; though the dreamt-of landscape is visible only to the dreamer, it is the object of his dream. Objectivity is built into the very subjectivity of consciousness by virtue of intentionality. Conversely and with the same justness, one may speak of the intentionality of appearances and their built-in subjectivity. All objects because they appear indicate a subject, and, just as every subjective act has its intentional object, so every appearing object has its intentional subject. In Portmann's words, every appearance is a "conveyance for receivers"... Whatever appears is meant for a perceiver, a potential subject no less inherent in all objectivity than a potential object is inherent in the subjectivity of every intentional act.
p46 That appearance always demands spectators and thus implies an at least potential recognition and acknowledgement has far-reaching consequences for what we, appearing beings in a world of appearances, understand by reality, our own as well as that of the world. [Descartes could have taken this and used it to prove the necessity of God as universal spectator.] In both cases, our "perceptual faith," as Merleau-Ponty has called it, our certainty that what we perceive has an existence independent of the act of perceiving, depends entirely on the object's also appearing as such to others and being acknowledged by them. Without this tacit acknowledgement by others we would not even be able to put faith in the way we appear to ourselves. [Do these people not remember their dreams?]
This is why all solipsistic theories -- whether they radically claim that nothing but the self "exists" or, more moderately, hold that the self and its consciousness of itself are the primary objects of verifiable knowledge -- are out of tune with the most elementary data of our existence and experience. [*Looking for someone to throttle.* "Reality revealed by shadows on cave wall proved by elementary data of our existence and experience as revealed by those shadows!"] Solipsism, open or veiled, with or without qualifications, has been the most persistent and, perhaps, the most pernicious fallacy of philosophy even before it attained in Descartes the high rank of theoretical and existential consistency...
It would be unfair (and again, it's annoying being put in the position of having to be fair to Descartes) to accuse Descartes of having constructed a solipsistic straw-man -- because there's nothing wrong with the single point of unquestionable reality he starts with. Arendt seems to be hostile to Descartes for even raising (so well) the issue of solipsism despite his having raised it merely to bury it under assumptions about God. Is this because I'm not the only one who mutters curses to himself while reading those God guaranteed paragraphs that follow "I think, therefore I am"? Hume certainly wasn't buying it.
p49 Although everything that appears is perceived in the mode of it-seems-to-me, hence open to error and illusion, appearance as such carries with it a prior indication of realness. All sense experiences are normally accompanied by the additional, if usually mute, sensation of reality, and this despite the fact that none of our senses, taken in isolation, and no sense-object, taken out of context, can produce it...
p50 The reality of what I perceive is guaranteed by its worldly context, which includes others who perceive as I do, on the one hand, and by the working together of my five senses on the other. What since Thomas Aquinas we call common sense, the sensus communis, is a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the "one faculty {that} extends to all objects of the five senses." This same sense, a mysterious "sixth sense" because it cannot be localized as a bodily organ, [why not just call it God, as Descartes does?] fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses -- so private that sensations in their mere sensational quality and intensity are incommunicable -- into a common world shared by others. The subjectivity of the it-seems-to-me is remedied by the fact that the same object also appears to others though its mode of appearance may be different. (It is the inter-subjectivity of the world, rather than similarity of physical appearance, that convinces men that they belong to the same species...) In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the same context in common... and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.
So, when in doubt about the reality of sense objects, we can decide the issue by polling some of those sense objects that we experience as speaking individuals similar to ourselves?
I was about to say that all this works fine if we are only concerned with objects as "objects of perception" -- as opposed to considering their reality independent of our perception -- but even that isn't entirely true. The one thing we do know about the "common sense" reality is that it is an illusion (illusions, really, since they are not all the same). This is especially true if you view reality at the atomic level or the level of Quantum Field Theory, but you don't even have to go that deep.
And when has philosophy ever been interested in establishing the common sense reality? What's key, at least for me, in this section, is the way Arendt has substituted her "sixth sense" for Descartes God-that-wouldn't-delude-us. This becomes the quicksand she is trying to construct her philosophy upon.
To each of our five senses corresponds a specific, sensorily perceptible property of the world... [Synesthesia?] The sixth sense's corresponding worldly property is realness, and the difficulty with this property is that it cannot be perceived like other sensory properties. [Rather like faith.] The sense of realness is not a sensation strictly speaking; reality "is there even if we can never be certain that we know it" (Peirce,) for the "sensation" of reality, of sheer thereness, relates to the context in which single objects appear as well as to the context in which we ourselves as appearances exist among other appearing creatures. The context quo context never appears entirely; it is elusive, almost like Being, which quo Being never appears in a world filled with beings, with single entities. But Being, since Parmenides the highest concept of Western philosophy, is a thought-thing that we do not expect to be perceived by the senses or to cause a sensation, whereas realness is akin to sensation; a feeling of realness (or irreality) actually accompanies all the sensations of my sense, which without it would not make "sense." This is why Thomas Aquinas defined common sense, his "sensus communis," as an "inner sense" -- sensus interior -- that functioned as "the common root and principle of the exterior senses"...
When you find yourself falling back on Scholastic principles don't you need to stop and ask what else you are agreeing to? Isn't Arendt simply spelling out what Descartes took for granted when he asserted that God wouldn't deceive us? Isn't this sixth sense simply the way God tells us what's real?
From a Darwinian perspective (or context) I really have no problem with this line of argument. But this isn't a work of biology or sociology.
No comments:
Post a Comment