The Life of the Mind (7 page)

In other words, the common philosophical understanding of Being as the ground of Appearance is true to the phenomenon of Life, but the same cannot be said of the evaluation of Being
versus
Appearance which is at the bottom of all two-world theories. That traditional hierarchy arises not from our ordinary experiences with the world of appearances, but, rather, from the not-at-all ordinary experience of the thinking ego. As we shall see later, the experience transcends not only Appearance but Being as well. Kant himself explicitly identifies the phenomenon that gave him the actual basis for his belief in a "thing in itself' behind "mere" appearances. It was the fact that "in the consciousness of myself in the sheer thinking activity
[beim blossen Denken],
I am the thing itself
[das Wesen selbst,
i.e.
das Ding an sich]
although nothing of myself is thereby given for thought."
⁴²
If I reflect on the relation of me to myself obtaining in the thinking activity, it may well seem as though my thoughts were "mere representations" or manifestations of an ego that itself remains forever concealed, for thoughts of course are never anything like properties that can be predicated of a self or a person. The thinking ego is indeed Kant's "thing in itself": it does not appear to others and, unlike the self of self-awareness, it does not appear to itself, and yet it is "not nothing."

The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story. Etienne Gilson, asked to write his autobiography, responded: "A man of seventy-five should have many things to say about his past, but ... if he has lived only as a philosopher, he immediately realizes that he has no past."
⁴³
For the thinking ego is not the self. There is an incidental remark—one of those on which we are so dependent in our inquiry—in Thomas Aquinas that sounds rather mysterious unless we are aware of this distinction between the thinking ego and the self: "My soul [in Thomas the organ for thought] is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man."
⁴⁴

The inner sense that might let us get hold of the thinking activity in some sort of inner intuition has nothing to hold on to, according to Kant, because its manifestations are utterly unlike "the appearance confronting external sense [which finds] something still and remaining ... while time, the only form of inner intuition, has nothing permanent."
⁴⁵
Hence, "I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. This
representation
is a
thought,
not an
intuition.
" And he adds in a footnote: "The 'I think' expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given thereby, but the mode in which I am ... is not thereby given."
⁴⁶
Kant stresses the point repeatedly in the
Critique of Pure Reason—
nothing permanent "is given in inner intuition insofar as I think myself"
⁴⁷
—but we will do better to turn to his pre-critical writings to find an actual description of the sheer experiences of the thinking ego.

In the
Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik
(1766), Kant stresses the "immateriality" of the
mundus intelligibilis,
the world in which the thinking ego moves, in contrast to the "inertia and constancy" of dead matter that surrounds living beings in the world of appearances. In this context, he distinguishes between the "notion the soul of man has of itself as mind [
Geist
] through an immaterial intuition, and the consciousness through which it presents itself as a man by means of an image having its source in the sensation of physical organs and conceived in relation to material things. It is, therefore, indeed always the same subject that is both a member of the visible and the invisible world, but not the same person, since ... what I as mind think is not remembered by me as man, and, conversely, my actual state as man does not enter my notion of myself as mind." And he speaks in a strange footnote of a "certain double personality which belongs to the soul even in this life"; he compares the state of the thinking ego to the state of sound sleep "when the external senses are completely at rest." The ideas in sleep, he suspects, "may be clearer and broader than the very clearest in the waking state," precisely because "man, at such times, is not sensible of his body." And of these ideas, on waking up, we remember nothing. Dreams are something still different; they "do not belong here. For then man does not wholly sleep ... and weaves the actions of his mind into the impressions of the external senses."
⁴⁸

These notions of Kant's, if understood as constituting a dream theory, are patently absurd. But they are interesting as a rather awkward attempt to account for the mind's experiences of withdrawal from the real world. Because an account does have to be given of an activity that, unlike any other activity or action, never meets the resistance of matter. It is not even hindered or slowed down by sounding out in words, which are formed by sense organs. The experience of the activity of thought is probably the aboriginal source of our notion of spirituality in itself, regardless of the forms it has assumed. Psychologically speaking, one of the outstanding characteristics of thought is its incomparable
swiftness—
"swift as a thought," said Homer, and Kant in his early writings speaks repeatedly of the
Hurtigkeit des Gedankens
.
⁴⁹
Thought is swift, clearly, because it is immaterial, and this in turn goes a long way toward explaining the hostility of so many of the great metaphysicians to their own bodies. From the viewpoint of the thinking ego, the body is nothing but an obstacle.

To conclude from this experience that there exist "things in themselves" which, in their own intelligible sphere,
are
as we "are" in a world of appearances belongs among the metaphysical fallacies, or, rather, semblances of reason, whose very existence Kant was the first to discover, to clarify, and dispel. It seems only proper that this fallacy, like most of the others that have afflicted the tradition of philosophy, should have its source in the experiences of the thinking ego. This one, at any rate, bears an obvious resemblance to a simpler and more common one, mentioned by P. F. Strawson in an essay on Kant: "It is, indeed, an old belief that reason is something essentially out of time and yet in us. Doubtless it has its ground in the fact that ... we grasp [mathematical and logical] truths. But...[one] who grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be timeless."
⁵⁰
It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understand these fallacies as logical non sequiturs—as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as "meaningless" are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, in our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.

Reality in a world of appearances is first of all characterized by "standing still and remaining" the same long enough to become an
object
for acknowledgment and recognition by a
subject.
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 act is ever without an object: though the seen tree may be an illusion, for 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" (a
Sendung für Empfangsapparate).
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.

That appearance always demands spectators and thus implies an at least potential recognition and acknowledgment 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. In both cases, our "perceptual faith,"
⁵¹
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 acknowledgment by others we would not even be able to put faith in the way we appear to ourselves.

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. 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. When the philosopher speaks of "man," he has in mind neither the species-being (the
Gattungswesen,
like horse or lion, which, according to Marx, constitutes man's fundamental existence) nor a mere paradigm of what, in the philosopher's view, all men should strive to emulate. To the philosopher, speaking out of the experience of the thinking ego, man is quite naturally not just word but
thought made flesh,
the always mysterious, never fully elucidated incarnation of the thinking capability. And the trouble with this fictitious being is that it is neither the product of a diseased brain nor one of the easily dispelled "errors of the past," but the entirely authentic semblance of the thinking activity itself. For while, for whatever reason, a man indulges in sheer thinking, and no matter on what subject, he lives completely in the singular, that is, in complete solitude, as though not men but Man inhabited the earth. Descartes himself explained and justified his radical subjectivism by the decisive loss of certainties entailed by the great scientific discoveries of the modern age, and I have, in a different context, followed up Descartes' reasoning.
⁵²
However, when—beset by the doubts inspired by the beginnings of modern science—he decided "
à rejeter la terre mouvante et le sable pour trouver le roc ou l'argile
" ("to reject the quicksand and mud in order to find the rock or clay"), he certainly rediscovered rather familiar territory in withdrawing to a place where he could live "
aussi solitaire et retiré que dans les déserts les plus écartés
" ("as solitary and retired as in the most remote deserts").
⁵³
Withdrawal from the "beastliness of the multitude" into the company of the "very few"
⁵⁴
but also into the absolute solitude of the One has been the most outstanding feature of the philosopher's life ever since Parmenides and Plato discovered that for those "very few," the
sophoi,
the "life of thinking" that knows neither joy nor grief is the most divine of all, and
nous,
thought itself, is "the king of heaven and earth."
⁵⁵

Descartes, true to the radical subjectivism that was the philosophers' first reaction to the new glories of science, no longer ascribed the gratifications of this way of life to the objects of thinking—the everlastingness of the
kosmos
that neither comes into being nor ever vanishes from it and thus gives those few who have decided to spend their lives as its spectators their share of immortality. His very modern suspicion of man's cognitive and sensory apparatus made him define with greater clarity than anyone before him as properties of the
res cogitans
certain characteristics that were by no means unknown to the ancients but that now, perhaps for the first time, assumed a paramount importance. Outstanding among these was self-sufficiency, namely, that this ego has "no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing," and, next, worldlessness, namely, that in self-inspection, "
examinant avec attention ce que j'étais,
" he could easily "
feindre que je n'avais aucun corps et qu'il n'y avait aucun monde ni aucun lieu où je fusse
" ( "feign that I had no body, and that there was no world nor place where I would be" ).
⁵⁶

To be sure, none of these discoveries, or, rather, re-discoveries, was of great importance in itself to Descartes. His main concern was to find something—the thinking ego or, in his words, "
la chose pensante,
" which he equated with the soul—whose reality was beyond suspicion, beyond the illusions of sense perception: even the power of an all-powerful
Dieu trompeur
would not be able to shatter the certainty of a consciousness that had withdrawn from all sense experience. Although everything given may be illusion and dream, the dreamer, if he will only consent not to demand reality of the dream, must be real. Hence, "
Je pense, donc je suis,
" "I think, therefore I am." 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 mouvantet
" (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 bom 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 the real and the unreal, between the common world of waking life and the private non-world of our dreams. What Merleau-Ponty had to say against Descartes is brilliantly right: To reduce perception to the thought of perceiving ... is to take out an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify us: for it is to ... move to a type of certitude that will never restore to us the 'there is' of the world."
⁵⁷