Conceptually, several other questions need to be answered about the NCC. What type of activity corresponds to the NCC (it has been proposed as long ago as the early part of the twentieth century that spiking activity synchronized across a population of neurons is a necessary condition for consciousness to occur)? What causes the NCC to occur? And, finally, what effect does the NCC have on postsynaptic structures, including motor output.
A promising experimental approach to locate the NCC is the use of bistable percepts in which a constant retinal stimulus gives rise to two percepts alternating in time, as in a Necker cube (Logothetis 1998). One version of this is binocular rivalry in which small images, say of a horizontal grating, are presented to the left eye and another image, say the vertical grating is shown to the corresponding location in the right eye. In spite of the constant visual stimulus, observers “see" the horizontal grating alternately every few seconds with the vertical one (Blake 1989). The brain does not allow for the simultaneous perception of both images.
It is possible, though difficult, to train a macaque monkey to report whether it is currently seeing the left or the right image. The distribution of the switching times and the way in which changing the contrast in one eye affects these leaves little to doubt, in that monkeys and humans experience the same basic phenomenon. In a series of elegant experiments, Logothetis and colleagues (Logothetis 1998) recorded from a variety of visual cortical areas in the awake macaque monkey while the animal performed a binocular rivalry task. In undeveloped visual cortices, only a small fraction of cells modulates their response as a function of the percept of the monkey, while 20 to 30% of neurons in higher visual areas in the cortex do so. The majority of cells increased their firing rate in response to one or the other retinal stimulus with little regard to what the animal perceives at the time. In contrast, in a high-level cortical area such as the inferior temporal cortex, almost all neurons responded only to the perceptual dominant stimulus (in other words, a “face” cell only fired when the animal indicated by its performance that it saw the face and not the pattern presented to the other eye). This makes it likely that the NCC involves activity in neurons in the inferior temporal lobe. Lesions in the homologous area in the human brain are known to cause very specific deficits in the conscious face or object recognition. However, it is possible that specific interactions between IT cells and neurons in parts of the prefrontal cortex are necessary in order for the NCC to be generated
Functional brain imaging in humans undergoing binocular rivalry has revealed that areas in the right prefrontal cortex are in activating during the perceptual switch from one percept to the other.
A number of alternate experimental paradigms are being investigated using electro physiological recordings of individual neurons in behaving animals and human patients, combined with functional brain imaging. Common to these is the manipulation of the complex and changing relationship between physical stimulus and the conscious percept. For instance, when subjects are forced rapidly to respond to a low saliency target, both monkeys and human’s sometimes claim to perceive such a target in the absence of any physical target consciously (false alarm) or fail to respond to a target (miss). The NCC in the appropriate sensory area should mirror the perceptual report under these dissociated conditions. Visual illusions constitute another rich source of experiments that can provide information concerning the neurons underlying these illusory percepts. A classical example is the motion affected in which a subject stares at a constantly moving stimulus (such as a waterfall) for a fraction of a minute or longer. Immediately after this conditioning period, a stationary stimulus will appear to move in the opposite direction. Because of the conscious experience of motion, one would expect, the subject’s cortical motion areas to be activated in the absence of any moving stimulus.
Future techniques, most likely based on the molecular identification and manipulation of discrete and identifiable subpopulations of cortical cells in appropriate animals, will greatly help in this endeavour
Identifying the type of activity and the type of neurons that gives rise to specific conscious percept in animals and humans would only be the first, even if critical, step in understanding consciousness. One also needs to know where these cells project to, their postsynaptic action, how they develop in early childhood, what happens to them in mental diseases known to affect consciousness in patients, such as schizophrenia or autism, and so on. And, of course, a final theory of consciousness would have to explain the central mystery, why a physical system with particular architectures gives rise to feelings and qualia.
The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practised in various guises for centuries, however, its maturing qualities have begun in the early parts of the 20th century. The works that have dramatically empathized the growths of phenomenology are accredited through the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.
Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of "phenomena": Appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning’s things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: Ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy - as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definitions of Phenomenological offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)
In recent philosophy of mind, the term "phenomenology" is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: What it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the Phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our "life-world.”
Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in contemporary views, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called "intentionality,” that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experiences abide toward the direction that represents or "intends" of things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.
The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we come to find in reflection or analysis, in that of which involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or "horizontal" awareness), awareness of one's own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one's movement), determination or intention represents its desire for action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).
Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions - conditions of the possibility - of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focussed on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focussed especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality is grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.
The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results. Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.
We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; Our focus is on our own human experience. Not all conscious beings will, or will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)
Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature - that of being experienced - is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, "I see/think/desire/do . . ." This feature is both a Phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (Phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).
How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes the entire focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience - unless its type is what interests us.
Classical phenomenologists practised some three distinguishable methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyse the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practised analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration.
These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of "neurophenomenology" assumes that conscious experience is grounded in neural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings - mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.
What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. This form of inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries after the issue arose with Locke's notion of self-consciousness on the heels of Descartes' sense of consciousness (conscience, co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one's mind's operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one's mental activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but notice that these results of Phenomenological analysis, that shape the characterlogical domain of study and the methodology appropriate to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experiences, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.
Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into fewer overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology - our own experience - spreads out from conscious experience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the domain of phenomenology.)
To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person: (1) I see that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the Pacific. (2) I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the hospital. (3) I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology. (4) I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week. (5) I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare. (6) I intend to finish my writing by noon. (7) I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk. (8) I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin. (9) I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.
Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of Phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term "I" indicate the first-person structure of the experience: The intentionality proceeds from the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity describing recognition, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about objects. The direct-object expression ("that fishing boat off the coast") articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the experience: the content or meaning of the experience, the core of what Husserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience: Subject-act-content-object.
Rich Phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty et al., will far outrun such simple Phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the Phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyse structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.
In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we immediately observe that we are analysing familiar forms of consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that. Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of the phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality, conditions involving motor skills and habits, backgrounding social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs, presents the following definition: "Phoneme, . . .”
The Oxford English Dictionary indicated of its knowledge, where science as itself is a contained source of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). That division of any science that describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon, appearance. In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, but only occasionally.
So its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: Literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato's cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?
Originally, in the 18th century, "phenomenology" meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The term seems to have been introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Subsequently, Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.
Suppose we say phenomenology study’s phenomena: Of what appears to us - and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.
In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind accedes of sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one's own sensations (seeing red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind of ideas, rationally formed "clear and distinct ideas" (in René Descartes' ideal). In Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge, fusing rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In Auguste Comte's theory of science, phenomena (phenomenes) are the facts (faits, what occurs) that a given science would explain.
In 18th and 19th century epistemology, then, phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain. Discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19th century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are of what is to occur in the mind: Mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception starting with colours and shapes. For Brentano, physical phenomena exist "intentionally" in acts of consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called "intentional in-existence. Nevertheless, the ontology remains undeveloped (what is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). More generally, we might say that phenomena are whatever we are conscious of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves, even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things as they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.
Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Brentano's descriptive psychology. In 1889 Brentano used the term "phenomenology" for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl's new science of phenomenology.
Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900-01). Two importantly different lines of theory came together in that monumental work: Psychological theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly impressed Husserl); Its logically semantic theory, are the heels of Bernard Bolzano and Husserl's contemporaries who founded modern logic, including Gottlob Frége. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Husserl's day.)
Husserl's Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano's ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano's conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations (Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema (from the Greek verb noéaw, meaning to perceive, thinks, intend, from where the noun nous or mind). The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis, while its ideal content is called noema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as "the object as intended.” Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl's theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl's basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)
For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology in that it describes and Analysed types of subjective mental activity or experience, in short, act of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind of logic - a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics) - in that it describes and Analysed objective contents of consciousness: Ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent the Platonistic logician Hermann Lotze),. Generally, any view supposed to owe its classical origin to the dialogues of Plato. In modern philosophy the view as expressed of Platonistic logic is taken specifically from the middle dialogues of abstract objects, such as those of mathematics, or concepts such as those of number or justice, are real independent, timeless and objective entities. Numbers stand to mathematical enquiry rather as countries do to geographical enquiry, and concepts stand in a similar relation to enquires such as philosophy or law that delve into their nature. Meanwhile, Husserl opposed any reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how the public happens to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.
A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl's development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-01). With theoretical foundations laid in the Investigations, Husserl would then promote the radical new science of phenomenology in Ideas I (1913). And alternative visions of phenomenology would soon follow.
Phenomenology matured and was nurtured through the works of Husserl, much as epistemology came about by means of its own nutrition but through Descartes study, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practised, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practising phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practising phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena (defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practising phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practising phenomenology. And when recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practising phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots tracing back through the centuries, came full to flower in Husserl.
Husserl's work was followed by a flurry of Phenomenological writing in the first half of the 20th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is apparent in the Encyclopaedic of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience. (6) Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.
The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of the diversity of the field of phenomenology.
In his Logical Investigations (1900-01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a Phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a Phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in Ideas I (1913) he focussed squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as "the science of the essence of consciousness,” entered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly "in the first person." In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness - that is, conscious experience of various types - as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of the subject living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.
In Ideas I Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of "transcendental idealism,” looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. But Husserl's transcendental, turn also involved his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics' notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by "bracketing" the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square. In Phenomenological reflection, we need not concern ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern ourselves with how the object is meant or intended. I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a referentially exposed Eucalyptus tree, with certain shape and with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.
Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl's (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain merged with a total inference by some realistic ontologism, as in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologists of the next generation, continued the resistance to Husserl's turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl's early writings, worked as Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928, succeeded Husserl in the prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own ideas about phenomenology.
In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always "in the world,” our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called "fundamental ontology.” We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of "Dasein" (that being whose being is in each case my own). Heidegger resisted Husserl's neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others.
In Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of "logos" and "phenomena,” so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of "letting things show themselves.” In Heidegger's inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “phenomenology” means . . . - to let that which shows itself to be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Husserl's call, "To the things themselves,” or "To the phenomena themselves!" Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of comportment or better relating (Verhalten) as in hammering a nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in seeing or thinking about a hammer. Much, of Being and Time develops an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.
In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Husserl's vision in the Logical Investigations (an early source of inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger's most innovative ideas was his conception of the "ground" of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from phenomenology, Heidegger held.
In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust's in Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked Madeleine. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes' work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes' insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one's own body, or one's lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20th century
In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war), Sartre developed his conception of Phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre's model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon is just a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their "being-in-itself.” Consciousness, by contrast, has "being-for-itself,” inasmuch as consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience de soi). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, that "I" or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).
For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre's method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations - a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes use of Sartre's great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Sartre's phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1945). In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project of choosing oneself, the defining pattern of one's past actions. Through vivid description of the "look" of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuance account of the perceived role of women as Other.
In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analysing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, focussed on correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focussed on rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focussed on the "body image,” our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Husserl's account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.
The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves, temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the Cogito (Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing: Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, for when taken seriously, is inseparable from this body and this world. In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).
In the years since Hussserl, Heidegger, et al. wrote that phenomenologists have dug into all these classical issues, including intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl et al. has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s, philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to 20th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and mind.
Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Analytic phenomenology picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn F¿llesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl's phenomenology and Frége's logical semantics (in Frége's "On Sense and Reference,” 1892). For Frége, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: Thus, two expressions (say, "the morning star" and "the evening star") may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or an act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: Thus, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.
More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered phenomenologically issues of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern psychology, and some look to empirical research in today's cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine Phenomenological issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioural studies and mathematical modelling. Such studies will extend the methods of traditional phenomenology as the Zeitgeist moves on. We address philosophy of mind below.
The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?
Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: Ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field: (1) Ontology is the study of beings or their being - what is. (2) Epistemology is the study of knowledge - how we know. (3) Logic is the study of valid reasoning - how to reason. (4) Ethics is the study of right and wrong - how we should act. (5) Phenomenology is the study of our experience - how we experience. The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.
Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is "first philosophy,” the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.
Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive description of the first-person knowledge. Through a form of intuition, consider logic, as a logical theory of meaning led Husserl into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience (thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language (as opposed to mathematical logic per se)
Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or ontology, and one that leads into the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl's phenomenology presupposes theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings - all parts of ontology
Now consider ethics: Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or of Geist (spirit, or culture, as in Zeitgeist). He once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In Being and Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to "falseness" and "authenticity" (all phenomena with theological echoes). In Being and Nothingness Sartre Analysed with subtlety the logical problem of "bad faith,” yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicit Phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologists who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focussed on the significance of the "face" of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience.
Allied with ethics are political and social philosophies. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were politically engaged, in 1940s Paris and their existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl Analysed the Phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice, which he found more primordial than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the Phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from Phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida has long practised a kind of phenomenology of language, pursuing sociologic meaning in the "deconstruction" of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French "poststructuralist" theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly Phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present purview.
Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.
It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.
The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frége, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle Analysed our Phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs - "believe,” "see,” etc. - does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to "the ghost in the machine"). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: What is the ontology of mind/body, and how are mind and body related?
René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: Bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary, mind-body problem.
After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that a person's brain at that time). The weaker of materialisms, holds instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them - sensations, thoughts, emotions - can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur - is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.
In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set it, and functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: They are function of mediating between information coming into the organism and behaviour proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional state of the brain or of the human (or an animal) organism. More specifically, on a favourite variation of functionalism, the mind is a computing system: Mind is to brain as software is to hardware; Thoughts are just programs running on the brain's "NetWare.” Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences - from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience - have tended toward a mix of materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found that Phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the functionalist paradigm too.
In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) that consciousness itself - especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience - escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed the case that sensory qualia - what it is like to feel pain, to see red, etc. - are not addressed or explained by a physical account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement computation.
In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require to "first-person" ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains "secrete" consciousness
The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle's theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl's. (Contemporary logical theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and Searle characterizes a mental state's intentionality by specifying its "satisfaction conditions"). However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists - including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty - seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.
The philosophy or theory of mind overall may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind: Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced, analysing the structure - the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and (certain) enabling conditions - of perception, thought, imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
Neuroscience studies the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for is the structure of experience, Analysed by phenomenology.
Cultural analysis studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Here we study the import of language and other social practices.
Ontology of mind studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging from perception (which involves causal input from environment to experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from volition to bodily movement).
This division of labour in the theory of mind can be seen as an extension of Brentano's original distinction between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own minds.
Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of intentionality, as it was, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined as the study of structures of experience or consciousness. Literally. , Phenomenology is the
Study of "phenomena": Appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning’s things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy - as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus is debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)
In recent philosophy of mind, the term "phenomenology" is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the Phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our "life-world.”
Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in contemporary views, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called "intentionality,” that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience remains directed towardly and represented or "intends" - things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.
The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or "horizontal" awareness), awareness of one's own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one's movement), purposive intention for its desire for action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).
Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions -conditions of the possibility - of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focussed on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focussed especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality is grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.
Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.
We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; Our focus is on our own, human, experience. Not all conscious beings will, or will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)
Conscious experiences have a unique feature: We experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature - that of being experienced -is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, "I see / think / desire / do . . ." This feature is both a Phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (Phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).
How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes the entire focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: While hearing a song, seeing the sun set, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, it is atypical of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience - unless its type is what interests us.
Classical phenomenologists practised some three distinguishable methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyse the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practised analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration.
These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of "neurophenomenology" assumes that conscious experience is grounded in neural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings - mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.
What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. This form of inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries after the issue arose with Locke's notion of self-consciousness on the heels of Descartes' sense of consciousness (conscience, co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one's mind's operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one's mental activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but notice that these results of Phenomenological analysis shape the characterization of the domain of study and the methodology appropriate to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that a living characterization resembling its self, that life is to offer the experience through which allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.
Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into fewer overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology - our own experience - spreads out from conscious experience into semiconscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the domain of phenomenology.)
To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person: (1) “I” witnesses that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the Pacific. (2) I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the hospital. (3) I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology. (4) I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week. (5) I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare. (6) I intend to finish my writing by noon. (7) I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk. (8) I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin. (9) I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.
Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of Phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term of "I,” indicates the first-person structure of the experience: The intentionality proceeds from the subject. As the verb indicates, the type of intentional activity so described, as perception, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about objects. The direct-object expression ("that fishing boat off the coast") articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the experience: The content or meaning of the experience, the core of what Husser called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates of a basic form of intentionality, in that of an experience has to its own subject-act-content-object.
Fruitful Phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, will far outrun such simple Phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the Phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyse structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.
In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we immediately observe that we are analysing familiar forms of consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that. Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of the phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality, conditions involving motor skills and habits, backgrounding to social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs. The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: "Phenomenology. (I) The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). (ii) That division of any science that describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon, appearance." In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, even if only occasionally.
In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: Literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato's cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?
Originally, in the 18th century, "phenomenology" meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The term seems to have been introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Subsequently, Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology.” From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.
Suppose we say phenomenology study’s phenomena: what appears to us - and its appearing? How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.
In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind are sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one's own sensations (seeing red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind are ideas, rationally formed "clear and distinct ideas" (in René Descartes' ideal). In Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge, fusing rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In Auguste Comte's theory of science, phenomena (phenomenes) are the facts (faits, what occurs) that a given science would explain.
In 18th and 19th century epistemology, then, phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain.
As the discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19th century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are of what occurs in the mind: Mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception starting with colours and shapes. For Brentano, physical phenomena exist "intentionally" in acts of consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called "intentional in-existence. However, the ontology remains undeveloped (what is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). Moreover, phenomenons are whatever we are conscious of, as a phenomenon might that its events lay succumbantly around us, other people, ourselves. Even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things as they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.
Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Brentano's descriptive psychology. In 1889 Brentano used the term "phenomenology" for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl's new science of phenomenology.
Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900-01). Two importantly different lines of theory came together in that monumental work: Psychological theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly impressed Husserl); However, analytical logic or semantic theory, on the his heels of Bernard Bolzano and Hussserl's contemporaries who founded modern logic, including Gottlob Frége. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Hussserl's day.)
Hussserl's Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano's ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano's conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations (Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema (from the Greek verb noéaw, meaning to perceive, think, intend, from what place the noun nous or mind). The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis, while its ideal content is called noema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as "the object as intended.” Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl's theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl's basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)
For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology in that it describes and analytical divisions of subjective mental activity or experience, in short, acts of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind of logic - a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics) -by that, it describes and approves to analytical justification that an objective content of consciousness, brings forthwith the ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent the platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how human beings happen to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.
A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl's development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-01). With theoretical foundations laid in the Investigations, Husserl would then promote the radical new science of phenomenology in Ideas. And alternative visions of phenomenology would soon follow.
Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemology came into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practised, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practising phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practising phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena (defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practising phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practising phenomenology. And when recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practising phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots tracing back through the centuries, came full to flower in Husserl.
Husserl's work was followed by a flurry of Phenomenological writing in the first half of the 20th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is apparent in the Encyclopaedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience. (6) Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.
The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of the diversity of the field of phenomenology.
In his Logical Investigations (1900-01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a Phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a Phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in Ideas I (1913) he focussed squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as "the science of the essence of consciousness,” entered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly "in the first person." In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness - that is, conscious experience of various types - as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of its topic for living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.
In Ideas, Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of "transcendental idealism,” looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. But Hussserl's transcendental, and turns to involve his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics' notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by "bracketing" the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square. In Phenomenological reflection, we need not concern ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern ourselves with how the object is meant or intended. I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see the object as a Eucalyptus tree, with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.
Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl's (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain cooperatively affiliated within there be of the view that finds to some associative values among the finer qualities that have to them the realist’s ontology, as in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologists of the next generation, continued the resistance to Hussserl's turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone. Martin Heidegger studied Hussserl's early writings, worked as Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928 Husserl was to succeed in the prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own ideas about phenomenology.
In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always "in the world,” our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called "fundamental ontology.” We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of "Dasein" (that being whose being is in each case my own). Heidegger resisted Husserl's neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others
In Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of "logos" and "phenomena,” so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of "letting things show themselves.” In Heidegger's inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “phenomenology” means, . . . to let that which shows itself be seen from themselves in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Hussserl's call, "To the things themselves!", or "To the phenomena themselves!" Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of comportment or better relating (Verhalten) as in hammering a nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in seeing or thinking about a hammer. Being and Time developed an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.
In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Hussserl's vision in the Logical Investigations (an early source of inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger's most innovative ideas was his conception of the "ground" of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from phenomenology, Heidegger held.
In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked madeleine. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes' work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes' insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one's own body, or one's lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20th century.
In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war), Sartre developed his conception of Phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre's model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon is just a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their "being-in-itself.” Consciousness, by contrast, has "being-for-itself,” since everything conscious is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the formal "I" or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).
For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre's method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations - a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes benefit from Sartre's great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Sartre's phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1945). In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project of choosing oneself, the defining pattern of one's past actions. Through vivid description of the "look" of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuance account of the perceived role of women as Other.
In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analysing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, focussed on correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focussed on rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focussed on the "body image,” our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Hussserl's account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.
The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves, temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the Cogito (Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing: Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when appropriated concrete, it is inseparable from this body and this world.
In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).
In the years since Hussserl, Heidegger, et al, wrote that its topic or ways of conventional study are to phenomenologists of having in accord dug into all these classical disseminations that include, intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl et al. has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s, philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to 20th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and mind.
Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Analytic phenomenology picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn F¿llesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl's phenomenology and Frége's logical semantics (in Frége's "On Sense and Reference,” 1892). For Frége, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: Thus, two expressions (say, "the morning star" and "the evening star") may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: Consequently, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.
More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered Phenomenological issues of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern psychology, and some look to empirical research in today's cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine Phenomenological issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioural studies and mathematical modelling. Such studies will extend the methods of traditional phenomenology as the Zeitgeist moves on.
The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?
Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: Ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic presupposes phenomenology as it joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field: (1) Ontology is the study of beings or their being - what is. (2) Epistemology is the study of knowledge - how we know. (3) Logic is the study of valid reasoning - how to reason. (4) Ethics is the study of right and wrong - how we should act. (5) Phenomenology is the study of our experience - how we experience.
The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.
Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is "first philosophy,” the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.
Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive description of first-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.
Consider logic saw being a logical theory of meaning, in that this had persuaded Husserl into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience (thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language (as opposed to mathematical logic per se).
Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or ontology, and one that lead into the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl's phenomenology presupposes theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings - all parts of ontology.
Now consider ethics. Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or of Geist (spirit, or culture, as in Zeitgeist). He once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In Being and Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to "falseness" and "authenticity" (all phenomena with theological echoes). In Being and Nothingness Sartre analysed with subtlety the logical problem of "bad faith,” yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicit Phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologists who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focussed on the significance of the "face" of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience.
Allied with ethics that on the same line, signify political and social philosophy. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were politically captivated in 1940s Paris, and their existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl analysed the Phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice, which he found more primordial than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the Phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from Phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida has long practised a kind of phenomenology of language, seeking socially meaning in the "deconstruction" of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French "poststructuralist" theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly Phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present purview.
Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.
It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.
The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frége, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analysed our Phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs - "believe,” "see,” etc. -does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to "the ghost in the machine"). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: What is the ontology of mind/body, and how are mind and body related?
René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary, mind-body problem.
After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person's brain at that time). A weaker materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them - sensations, thoughts, emotions - can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur - is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.
In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set it, and functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: They are function of mediating between information coming into the organism and behaviour proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional state of the brain or of the human or an animal organism. More specifically, on a favourite variation of functionalism, the mind is a computing system: Mind is to brain as software is to hardware; Thoughts are just programs running on the brain's "NetWare.” Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences - from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience - have tended toward a mix of materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found that Phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the functionalist paradigm too.
In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) that consciousness itself - especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience - escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed the case that sensory qualia - what it is like to feel pain, to see red, etc. - are not addressed or explained by a physical account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement computation.
In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require the "first-person" ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has of the syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: We interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: Our brains "secrete" consciousness.
The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle's theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl's. (Contemporary logical theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and Searle characterizes a mental state's intentionality by specifying its "satisfaction conditions"). However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists - including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty - seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.
The philosophy or theory of mind overall may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind: Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced, analysing the structure - the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and (certain) enabling conditions - of perception, thought, imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
Neuroscience studies the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for is the structure of experience, analysed by phenomenology.
Cultural analysis studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Here we study the import of language and other social practices. Ontology of mind studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging from perception (which involves causal input from environment to experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from volition to bodily movement).
This division of labour in the theory of mind can be seen as an extension of Brentano's original distinction between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own minds.
Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of intentionality, as it were, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.
There is potentially a rich and productive interface between neuroscience/cognitive science. The two traditions, however, have evolved largely independent, based on differing sets of observations and objectives, and tend to use different conceptual frameworks and vocabulary representations. The distributive contributions to each their dynamic functions of finding a useful common reference to further exploration of the relations between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychoanalysis/psychotherapy.
Forthwith, is the existence of a historical gap between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy is being productively closed by, among other things, the suggestion that recent understandings of the nervous system as a modeler and predictor bear a close and useful similarity to the concepts of projection and transference. The gap could perhaps be valuably narrowed still further by a comparison in the two traditions of the concepts of the "unconscious" and the "conscious" and the relations between the two. It is suggested that these be understood as two independent "story generators" - each with different styles of function and both operating optimally as reciprocal contributors to each others' ongoing story evolution. A parallel and comparably optimal relation might be imagined for neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy.
For the sake of argument, imagine that human behaviour and all that it entails (including the experience of being a human and interacting with a world that includes other humans) is a function of the nervous system. If this were so, then there would be lots of different people who are making observations of (perhaps different) aspects of the same thing, and telling (perhaps different) stories to make sense of their observations. The list would include neuroscientists and cognitive scientists and psychologists. It would include as well psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and social workers. If we were not too fussy about credentials, it should probably include as well educators, and parents and . . . babies? Arguably, all humans, from the time they are born, spend significant measures of their time making observations of how people (others and themselves) behave and why, and telling stories to make sense of those observations.
The stories, of course, all differ from one another to greater or lesser degrees. In fact, the notion that "human behaviour and all that it entails . . . is a function of the nervous system" is itself a story used to make sense of observations by some people and not by others. It is not my intent here to try to defend this particular story, or any other story for that matter. Very much to the contrary, is to explore the implications and significance of the fact that there ARE different stories and that they might be about the same (some)thing
In so doing, I want to try to create a new story that helps to facilitate an enhanced dialogue between neuroscience/cognitive science, on the one hand, and psychotherapy, on the other. That new story is itself is a story of conflicting stories within . . . what is called the "nervous system" but others are free to call the "self," "mind," "soul," or whatever best fits their own stories. What is important is the idea that multiple things, evident by their conflicts, may not in fact be disconnected and adversarial entities but could rather be fundamentally, understandably, and valuably interconnected parts of the same thing.
Many practising psychoanalysts (and psychotherapists too, I suspect) feel that the observations/stories of neuroscience/cognitive science are for their own activities, least of mention, are at primes of irrelevance, and at worst destructive, and the same probable holds for many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists. Pally clearly feels otherwise, and it is worth exploring a bit why this is so in her case. A general key, I think, is in her line "In current paradigms, the brain has intrinsic activity, is highly integrated, is interactive with the environment, and is goal-oriented, with predictions operating at every level, from lower systems to . . . the highest functions of abstract thought." Contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science has indeed uncovered an enormous complexity and richness in the nervous system, "making it not so different from how psychoanalysts (or most other people) would characterize the self, at least not in terms of complexity, potential, and vagary." Given this complexity and richness, there is substantially less reason than there once was to believe psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are dealing with two fundamentally different thing’s ally suspects, more aware of this than many psychotherapists because she has been working closely with contemporary neuroscientists who are excited about the complexity to be found in the nervous system. And that has an important lesson, but there is an additional one at least as important in the immediate context. In 1950, two neuroscientists wrote: "The sooner we realize that not to expect of expectation itself, which we would recognize the fact that the complex and higher functional Gestalts that leave the reflex physiologist dumfounded in fact send roots down to the simplest basal functions of the CNS, the sooner we will see that the previously terminologically insurmountable barrier between the lower levels of neurophysiology and higher behavioural theory simply dissolves away."
And in 1951 another said, "I am becoming subsequently forwarded by the conviction that the rudiments of every behavioural mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale and represented in primitive activities of the nervous system."
Neuroscience (and what came to be cognitive science) was engaged from very early on in an enterprise committed to the same kind of understanding sought by psychotherapists, but passed through a phase (roughly from the 1950's to the 1980's) when its own observations and stories were less rich in those terms. It was a period that gave rise to the notion that the nervous system was "simple" and "mechanistic," which in turn made neuroscience/cognitive science seem less relevant to those with broader concerns, perhaps even threatening and apparently adversarial if one equated the nervous system with "mind," or "self," or "soul," since mechanics seemed degrading to those ideas. Arguably, though, the period was an essential part of the evolution of the contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science story, one that laid needed groundwork for rediscovery and productive exploration of the richness of the nervous system. Psychoanalysis/psychotherapy of course went through its own story evolution over this time. That the two stories seemed remote from one another during this period was never adequate evidence that they were not about the same thing but only an expression of their needed independent evolutions.
An additional reason that Pally is comfortable with the likelihood that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are talking about the same thing is her recognition of isomorphism (or congruities, Pulver 2003) between the two sets of stories, places where different vocabularies in fact seem to be representing the same (or quite similar) things. I am not sure I am comfortable calling these "shared assumptions" (as Pally does) since they are actually more interesting and probably more significant if they are instead instances of coming to the same ideas from different directions (as I think they are). In this case, the isomorphism tend to imply that, rephrasing Gertrude Stein, "that there exists an actual there.” Regardless, Pally has entirely appropriately and, I think, usefully called attention to an important similarity between the psychotherapeutic concept of "transference" and an emerging recognition within neuroscience/cognitive science that the nervous system does not so much collect information about the world as generate a model of it, act in relation to that model, and then check incoming information against the predictions of that model. Pally's suggestion that this model reflects in part early interpersonal experiences, can be largely "unconscious," and so may cause inappropriate and troubling behaviour in current time seems entirely reasonable. So too is she to think of thoughts that there is an interaction with the analyst, and this can be of some help by bringing the model to "consciousness" through the intermediary of recognizing the transference onto the analyst.
The increasing recognition of substantial complexity in the nervous system together with the presence of identifiable isomorphism provides a solid foundation for suspecting that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are indeed talking about the same thing. But the significance of different stories for better understanding a single thing lies as much in the differences between the stories as it does in their similarities/isomorphism, in the potential for differing and not obviously isomorphic stories productively to modify each other, yielding a new story in the process. With this thought in mind, I want to call attention to some places where the psychotherapeutic and the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific stories have edges that rub against one another rather than smoothly fitting together. And perhaps to ways each could be usefully further evolved in response to those non-isomorphism.
Unconscious stories and "reality.” Though her primary concern is with interpersonal relations, Pally clearly recognizes that transference and related psychotherapeutic phenomena are one (actually relatively small) facet of a much more general phenomenon, the creation, largely unconsciously, of stories that are understood to be that of what are not necessarily reflective of the "real world.” Ambiguous figures illustrate the same general phenomenon in a much simpler case, that of visual perception. Such figures may be seen in either of two ways; They represent two "stories" with the choice between them being, at any given time, largely unconscious. More generally, a serious consideration of a wide array of neurobiological/cognitive phenomena clearly implies that, as Pally said, that if we could ever see "reality," but only have stories to describe it that result from processes of which we are not consciously aware.
All of this raises some quite serious philosophical questions about the meaning and usefulness of the concept of "reality." In the present context, what is important is that it is a set of questions that sometimes seem to provide an insurmountable barrier between the stories of neuroscientists/cognitive scientists, who by and large think they are dealing with reality, and psychotherapists, who feel more comfortable in more idiosyncratic and fluid spaces. In fact, neuroscience and cognitive science can proceed perfectly well in the absence of a well-defined concept of "reality" and, without being fully conscious of it, does in fact do so. And psychotherapists actually make more use of the idea of "reality" than is entirely appropriate. There is, for example, a tendency within the psychotherapeutic community to presume that unconscious stories reflect "traumas" and other historically verifiable events, while the neurobiological/cognitive science story says quite clearly that they may equally reflect predispositions whose origins reflect genetic information and hence bear little or no relation to "reality" in the sense usually meant. They may, in addition, reflect random "play" (Grobstein, 1994), putting them even further out of reach of easy historical interpretation. In short, with regard to the relation between "story" and "reality," each set of stories could usefully be modified by greater attention to the other. Differing concepts of "reality" (perhaps the very concept itself) gets in the way of usefully sharing stories. The neurobiologists and/or/cognitive scientists' preoccupation with "reality" as an essential touchstone could valuably be lessened, and the therapist's sense of the validation of story in terms of personal and historical idiosyncrasies could be helpfully adjusted to include a sense of actual material underpinnings.
The Unconscious and the Conscious. Pally appropriately makes a distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, one that has always been fundamental to psychotherapy. Neuroscience/cognitive science has been slower to make a comparable distinction but is now rapidly beginning to catch up. Clearly some neural processes generate behaviour in the absence of awareness and intent and others yield awareness and intent with or without accompanying behaviour. An interesting question however, raised at a recent open discussion of the relations between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, is whether the "neurobiological unconscious" is the same thing as the "psychotherapeutic unconscious," and whether the perceived relations between the "unconscious" and the"conscious" are the same in the two sets of stories. Is this a case of an isomorphism or, perhaps more usefully, a masked difference?
An oddity of Pally's article is that she herself acknowledges that the unconscious has mechanisms for monitoring prediction errors and yet implies, both in the title of the paper, and in much of its argument, that there is something special or distinctive about consciousness (or conscious processing) in its ability to correct prediction errors. And here, I think, there is evidence of a potentially useful "rubbing of edges" between the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific tradition and the psychotherapeutic one. The issue is whether one regards consciousness (or conscious processing) as somehow "superior" to the unconscious (or unconscious processing). There is a sense in Pally of an old psychotherapeutic perspective of the conscious as a mechanism for overcoming the deficiencies of the unconscious, of the conscious as the wise father/mother and the unconscious as the willful child. Actually, Pally does not quite go this far, but there is enough of a trend to illustrate the point and, without more elaboration, I do not think many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists will catch Pally's more insightful lesson. I think Pally is almost certainly correct that the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious can achieve results unachievable by the unconscious alone, but think also that neither psychotherapy nor neuroscience/cognitive science are yet in a position to say exactly why this is so. So let me take a crack here at a new, perhaps bi-dimensional story that could help with that common problem and perhaps both traditions as well.
A major and surprising lesson of comparative neuroscience, supported more recently by neuropsychology (Weiskrantz, 1986) and, more recently still, by artificial intelligence is that an extraordinarily rich repertoire of adaptive behaviour can occur unconsciously, in the absence of awareness of intent (be supported by unconscious neural processes). It is not only modelling of the world and prediction and error correction that can occur this way but virtually (and perhaps literally) the entire spectrum of behaviour externally observed, including fleeing from threat, approaching good things, generating novel outputs, learning from doing so, and so on.
This extraordinary terrain, discovered by neuroanatomists, electrophysiologists, neurologists, behavioural biologists, and recently extended by others using more modern techniques, is the unconscious of which the neuroscientists/cognitive scientist speaks. It is a terrain so surprisingly rich that it creates, for some people, the inpuzzlement about whether there is anything else at all. Moreover, it seems, at first glance, to be a totally different terrain from that of the psychotherapist, whose clinical experience reveals a territory occupied by drives, unfulfilled needs, and the detritus with which the conscious would prefer not to deal.
As indicated earlier, it is one of the great strengths of Pally's article to suggest that the two terrains may in fact turns out to be the same in many ways, but if they are of the same line, it then becomes the question of whether or not it feels in what way nature resembles the "unconscious" and the "conscious" different? Where now are the "two stories?” Pally touches briefly on this point, suggesting that the two systems differ not so much (or at all?) in what they do, but rather in how they do it. This notion of two systems with different styles seems to me worth emphasizing and expanding. Unconscious processing is faster and handles many more variables simultaneously. Conscious processing is slower and handles several variables at one time. It is likely that there appear to a host of other differences in style as well, in the handling of number for example, and of time.
In the present context, however, perhaps the most important difference in style is one that Lacan called attention to from a clinical/philosophical perspective - the conscious (conscious processing) that has in resemblance to some objective "coherence," that is, it attempts to create a story that makes sense simultaneously of all its parts. The unconscious, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with bits and pieces lying around with no global order. To a neurobiologist/cognitive scientist, this makes perfectly good sense. The circuitry includes the unconscious (sub-cortical circuitry?) assembly of different parts organized for a large number of different specific purposes, and only secondarily linked together to try to assure some coordination? The circuitry preserves the conscious precessing (neo-cortical circuitry?), that, on the other hand, seems to both be more uniform and integrated and to have an objective for which coherence is central.
That central coherence is well-illustrated by the phenomena of "positive illusions,” exemplified by patients who receive a hypnotic suggestion that there is an object in a room and subsequently walk in ways that avoid the object while providing a variety of unrelated explanations for their behaviour. Similar "rationalization" is, of course, seen in schizophrenic patients and in a variety of fewer dramatic forms in psychotherapeutic settings. The "coherent" objective is to make a globally organized story out of the disorganized jumble, a story of (and constituting) the "self."
What this thoroughly suggests is that the mind/brain be actually organized to be constantly generating at least two different stories in two different styles. One, written by conscious processes in simpler terms, is a story of/about the "self" and experienced as such, for developing insights into how such a story can be constructed using neural circuitry. The other is an unconscious "story" about interactions with the world, perhaps better thought of as a series of different "models" about how various actions relate to various consequences. In many ways, the latter is the grist for the former.
In this sense, we are safely back to the two story ideas that has been central to psychotherapy, but perhaps with some added sophistication deriving from neuroscience/cognitive science. In particular, there is no reason to believe that one story is "better" than the other in any definitive sense. They are different stories based on different styles of story telling, with one having advantages in certain sorts of situations (quick responses, large numbers of variables, more direct relation to immediate experiences of pain and pleasure) and the other in other sorts of situations (time for more deliberate responses, challenges amenable to handling using smaller numbers of variables, more coherent, more able to defer immediate gratification/judgment.
In the clinical/psychotherapeutic context, an important implication of the more neutral view of two story-tellers outlined above is that one ought not to over-value the conscious, nor to expect miracles of the process of making conscious what is unconscious. In the immediate context, the issue is if the unconscious is capable of "correcting prediction errors,” then why appeal to the conscious to achieve this function? More generally, what is the function of that persistent aspect of psychotherapy that aspires to make the unconscious conscious? And why is it therapeutically effective when it is? Here, it is worth calling special attention to an aspect of Pally's argument that might otherwise get a bit lost in the details of her article: . . . the therapist encourages the wife to stop consciously and consider her assumption that her husband does not properly care about her, and to effort fully consider an alternative view and inhibit her impulse to reject him back. This, in turn, creates a new type of experience, one in which he is indeed more loving, such that she can develop new predictions."
It is not, as Pally describes it, the simple act of making something conscious that is therapeutically effective. What is necessary is too consciously recompose the story (something that is made possible by its being a story with a small number of variables) and, even more important, to see if the story generates a new "type of experience" that in turn causes the development of "new predictions." The latter, I suggest, is an effect of the conscious on the unconscious, an alteration of the unconscious brought about by hearing, entertaining, and hence acting on a new story developed by the conscious. It is not "making things conscious" that is therapeutically effective; it is the exchange of stories that encourages the creation of a new story in the unconscious.
For quite different reasons, Grey (1995) earlier made a suggestion not dissimilar to Pally's, proposing that consciousness was activated when an internal model detected a prediction failure, but acknowledged he could see no reason "why the brain should generate conscious experience of any kind at all." It seems to me that, despite her title, it is not the detection of prediction errors that is important in Pally's story. Instead, it is the detection of mismatches between two stories, one unconscious and the other conscious, and the resulting opportunity for both to shape a less trouble-making new story. That, in brief, is it to why the brain "should generate conscious experience,” and reap the benefits of having a second story teller with which a different style of paraphrasing Descartes, one might know of another in what one might say "I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am.” It is not only the neurobiological "conscious" that can undergo change; it is the neurobiological "unconscious" as well.
More generally, the most effective psychotherapy requires the recognitions that assume their responsibility is rapidly emerging from neuroscience/cognitive science, that the brain/mind has evolved with two (or more) independent story tellers and has done so precisely because there are advantages to having independent story tellers that generate and exchange different stories. The advantage is that each can learn from the other, and the mechanisms to convey the stories and forth and for each story teller to learn from the stories of the other are a part of our evolutionary endowment as well. The problems that bring patients into a therapist's office are problems in the breakdown of story exchange, for any of a variety of reasons, and the challenge for the therapist is to reinstate the confidence of each story teller in the value of the stories created by the other. Neither the conscious nor the unconscious is primary; they function best as an interdependent loop with each developing its own story facilitated by the semi-independent story of the other. In such an organization, there is not only no "real,” and no primacy for consciousness, there is only the ongoing development and, ideally, effective sharing of different stories.
There are, in the story I am outlining, implications for neuroscience/cognitive science as well. The obvious key questions are what does one mean (in terms of neurons and neuronal assemblies) by "stories," and in what ways are their construction and representation different in unconscious and conscious neural processing. But even more important, if the story I have outlined makes sense, what are the neural mechanisms by which unconscious and conscious stories are exchanged and by which each kind of story impacts on the other? And why (again in neural terms) does the exchange sometimes break down and fail in a way that requires a psychotherapist - an additional story teller - to be repaired?
Just as the unconscious and the conscious are engaged in a process of evolving stories for separate reasons and using separate styles, so too have been and will continue to be neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy. And it is valuable that both communities continue to do so. But there is every reason to believe that the different stories are indeed about the same thing, not only because of isomorphism between the differing stories but equally because the stories of each can, if listened to, be demonstrably of value to the stories of the other. When breakdowns in story sharing occur, they require people in each community who are daring enough to listen and be affected by the stories of the other community. Pally has done us all a service as such a person. I hope my reactions to her article will help further to construct the bridge she has helped to lay, and that others will feel inclined to join in an act of collective story telling that has enormous intellectual potential and relates as well very directly to a serious social need in the mental health arena. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that an enhanced skill at hearing, respecting, and learning from differing stories about similar things would be useful in a wide array of contexts.
There is now a more satisfactory range of ideas available [in the field of consciousness studies] . . . They involve mostly quantum objects called Bose-Einstein condensates that may be capable of forming ephemeral but extended structures in the brain (Pessa). Marshall's original idea (based on the work of Frölich) was that the condensates that comprise the physical basis of mind, form from activity of vibrating molecules (dipoles) in nerve cell membranes. One of us (Clarke) has found theoretical evidence that the distribution of energy levels for such arrays of molecules prevents this happening in the way that Marshall first thought. However, the occurrence of similar condensates centring around the microtubules that are an important part of the structure of every cell, including nerve cells, remains a theoretical possibility (del Giudice et al.). Hameroff has pointed out that single-cell organisms such as 'paramecium' can perform quite complicated actions normally thought to need a brain. He suggests that their 'brain' be in their microtubules. Shape changes in the constituent proteins (tubulin) could subserve computational functions and would involve quantum phenomena of the sort envisaged by del Giudice. This raises the intriguing possibility that the most basic cognitive unit is provided, not by the nerve cell synapse as is usually supposed, but by the microtubular structure within cells. The underlying intuition is that the structures formed by Bose-Einstein condensates are the building Forms of mental life; in relation to perception they are models of the world, transforming a pleasant view, say, into a mental structure that represents some of the inherent qualities of that view.
We thought that, if there is anything to ideas of this sort, the quantum nature of awareness should be detectable experimentally. Holism and non-locality are features of the quantum world with no precise classical equivalents. The former presupposes that the interacting systems have to be considered as wholes - you cannot deal with one part in isolation from the rest. Non-locality means, among other things, that spatial separation between its parts does not alter the requirement to deal with an interacting system holistically. If we could detect these in relation to awareness, we would show that consciousness cannot be understood solely in terms of classical concepts.
Generative thought and words are the attempts to discover the relation between thought and speech at the earliest stages of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. We found no specific interdependence between the genetic roots of thought and of word. It became plain that the inner relationship we were looking for was not a prerequisite for, but rather a product of, the historical development of human consciousness.
In animals, even in anthropoids whose speech is phonetically like human speech and whose intellect is akin to man’s, speech and thinking are not interrelated. A prelinguistic epoché through which times interval in thought and a preintellectual period in speech undoubtedly exist also in the development of the child. Thought and word are not connected by a primary bond. A connection originates, changes, and grows in the course of the evolution of thinking and speech.
It would be wrong, however, to regard thought and speech as two unrelated processes either parallel or crossing at certain points and mechanically influencing each other. The absence of a primary bond does not mean that a connection between them can be formed only in a mechanical way. The futility of most of the earlier investigations was largely due to the assumption that thought and word were isolated, independent elements, and verbal thought the fruit of their external union.
The method of analysis based on this conception was bound to fail. It sought to explain the properties of verbal thought by breaking it up into its component elements, thought and word, neither of which, taken separately, possessed the properties of the whole. This method is not true analysis helpful in solving concrete problems. It leads, rather, to generalisation. We compared it with the analysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen - which can result only in findings applicable to all water existing in nature, from the Pacific Ocean to a raindrop. Similarly, the statement that verbal thought is composed of intellectual processes and speech is functionally proper applications to all verbal thought and all its manifestations and explains none of the specific problems facing the student of verbal thought.
We tried a new approach to the subject and replaced analysis into elements by analysis into units, each of which retains in simple form all the properties of the whole. We found this unit of verbal thought in word meaning.
The meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and language that it is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a phenomenon of thought. A word without meaning is an empty sound; meaning, therefore, is a criterion of “word,” its indispensable component. It would seem, then, that it may be regarded as a phenomenon of speech. But from the point of view of psychology, the meaning of every word is a generalisation or a concept. And since generalisations and concepts are undeniably acts of thought, but we may regard meaning as a phenomenon of thinking. It does not follow, however, that meaning formally belongs in two different spheres of psychic life. Word meaning is a phenomenon of thought only insofar as thought is embodied in speech, and of speech only insofar as speech is connected with thought and illumined by it. It is a phenomenon of verbal thought, or meaningful speech - a union of word and thought.
Our experimental investigations fully confirm this basic thesis. They not only proved that concrete study of the development of verbal thought is made possible by the use of word meaning as the analytical unit but they also led to a further thesis, which we consider the major result of our study and which issues directly from the further thesis that word meanings develop. This insight must replace the postulate of the immutability of word meanings.
From the point of view of the old schools of psychology, the bond between word and meaning is an associative bond, established through the repeated simultaneous perception of a certain sound and a certain object. A word calls to mind its content as the overcoat of a friend reminds us of that friend, or a house of its inhabitants. The association between word and meaning may grow stronger or weaker, be enriched by linkage with other objects of a similar kind, spread over a wider field, or become more limited, i.e., it may undergo quantitative and external changes, but it cannot change its psychological nature. To do that, it would have to cease being an association. From that point of view, any development in word meanings is inexplicable and impossible - an implication that impeded linguistics as well as psychology. Once having committed itself to the association theory, semantics persisted in treating word meaning as an association between a word’s sound and its content. All words, from the most concrete to the most abstract, appeared to be formed in the same manner in regard to meaning, and to contain nothing peculiar to speech as such; a word made us think of its meaning just as any object might remind us of another. It is hardly surprising that semantics did not even pose the larger question of the development of word meanings. Development was reduced to changes in the associative connections between single words and single objects: A word brawn to denote at first one object and then become associated with another, just as an overcoat, having changed owners, might remind us first of one person and later of another. Linguistics did not realize that in the historical evolution of language the very structure of meaning and its psychological nature also change. From primitive generalisations, verbal thought rises to the most abstract concepts. It is not merely the content of a word that changes, but the way in which reality is generalised and reflected in a word.
Equally inadequate is the association theory in explaining the development of word meanings in childhood. Here, too, it can account only for the pure external, quantitative changes in the bonds uniting word and meaning, for their enrichment and strengthening, but not for the fundamental structural and psychological changes that can and do occur in the development of language in children.
Oddly enough, the fact that associationism in general had been abandoned for some time did not seem to affect the interpretation of word and meaning. The Wuerzburg school, whose main object was to prove the impossibility of reducing thinking to a mere play of associations and to demonstrate the existence of specific laws governing the flow of thought, did not revise the association theory of word and meaning, or even recognise the need for such a revision. It freed thought from the fetters of sensation and imagery and from the laws of association, and turned it into a purely spiritual act. By so doing, it went back to the prescientific concepts of St. Augustine and Descartes and finally reached extreme subjective idealism. The psychology of thought was moving toward the ideas of Plato. Speech, at the same time, was left at the mercy of association. Even after the work of the Wuerzburg school, the connection between a word and its meaning was still considered a simple associative bond. The word was seen as the external concomitant of thought, its attire only, having no influence on its inner life. Thought and speech had never been as widely separated as during the Wuerzburg period. The overthrow of the association theory in the field of thought actually increased its sway in the field of speech.
The work of other psychologists further reinforced this trend. Selz continued to investigate thought without considering its relation to speech and came to the conclusion that man’s productive thinking and the mental operations of chimpanzees were identical in nature – so completely did he ignore the influence of words on thought.
Even Ach, who made a special studies in phraseology, by the meaning of who tried to overcome the correlation in his theory of concepts, did not go beyond assuming the presence of “determining tendencies” operative, along with associations, in the process of concept formation. Hence, the conclusions he reached did not change the old understanding of word meaning. By identifying concept with meaning, he did not allow for development and changes in concepts. Once established, the meaning of a word was set forever; Its development was completed. The same principles were taught by the very psychologists Ach attacked. To both sides, the starting point was also the end of the development of a concept; the disagreement concerned only the way in which the formation of word meanings began.
In Gestalt psychology, the situation was not very different. This school was more consistent than others in trying to surmount the general principle of a collective associationism. Not satisfied with a partial solution of the problem, it tried to liberate thinking and speech from the rule of association and to put both under the laws of structure formation. Surprisingly, even this most progressive of modern psychological schools made no progress in the theory of thought and speech.
For one thing, it retained the complete separation of these two functions. In the light of Gestalt psychology, the relationship between thought and word appears as a simple analogy, a reduction of both to a common structural denominator. The formation of the first meaningful words of a child is seen as similar to the intellectual operations of chimpanzees in Koehler’s experiments. Words that filter through the structure of things and acquire a certain functional meaning, in much the same way as the stick, to the chimpanzee, becomes part of the structure of obtaining the fruit and acquires the functional meaning of tool, that the connection between word and meaning is no longer regarded as a matter of simple association but as a matter of structure. That seems like a step forward. But if we look more closely at the new approach, it is easy to see that the step forward is an illusion and that we are still standing in the same place. The principle of structure is applied to all relations between things in the same sweeping, undifferentiated way as the principle of association was before it. It remains impossible to deal with the specific relations between word and meaning.
They are from the outset accepted as identical in principle with any and all other relations between things. All cats are as grey in the dusk of Gestalt psychology as in the earlier plexuities that assemble in universal associationism.
While Ach sought to overcome the associationism with “determining tendencies,” Gestalt psychology combatted it with the principle of structure - retaining, however, the two fundamental errors of the older theory: the assumption of the identical nature of all connections and the assumption that word meanings do not change. The old and the new psychology both assume that the development of a word’s meaning is finished as soon as it emerges. The new trends in psychology brought progress in all branches except in the study of thought and speech. Here the new principles resemble the old ones like twins.
If Gestalt psychology is at a standstill in the field of speech, it has made a big step backward in the field of thought. The Wuerzburg school at least recognised that thought had laws of its own. Gestalt psychology denies their existence. By reducing to a common structural denominator the perceptions of domestic fowl, the mental operations of chimpanzees, the first meaningful words of the child, and the conceptual thinking of the adult, it obliterates every distinction between the most elementary perception and the highest forms of thought.
This may be summed up as follows: All the psychological schools and trends overlook the cardinal point that every thought is a generalisation. They all study word and meaning without any reference to development. As long as these two conditions persist in the successive trends, there cannot be much difference in the treatment of the problem.
The discovery that word meanings evolve leads the study of thought and speech out of a blind alley. Word meanings are dynamic rather than static formations. They change as the child develops; they change also with the various ways in which thought functions.
If word meanings change in their inner nature, then the relation of thought to word also changes. To understand the dynamics of that relationship, we must supplement the genetic approach of our main study by functional analysis and examine the role of word meaning in the process of thought.
Let us consider the process of verbal thinking from the first dim stirring of a thought to its formulation. What we want to show now is not how meanings develop over long periods of time but the way they function in the live process of verbal thought. On the basis of such a functional analysis, we will be able to show also that each stage in the development of word meaning has its own particular relationship between thought and speech. Since functional problems are most readily solved by examining the highest form of a given activity, we will, for a while, put aside the problem of development and consider the relations between thought and word in the mature mind.
The leading idea in the following discussion can be reduced to this formula: The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought. In that process the relation of thought to word undergoes changes that they may be regarded as development in the functional sense. Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought tends to connect something with something else, to establish a relationship between things. Every thought moves, grows and develops, fulfils a function, solves a problem. This flow of thought occurs as an inner movement through a series of planes. An analysis of the interaction of thought and word must begin with an investigation of the different phases and planes a thought traverses before it is embodied in words.
The first thing such a study reveals is the need to distinguish between two planes of speech. Both the inner, meaningful, semantic aspect of speech and the external, phonetic aspects, though forming a true unity, have their own laws of movement. The unity of speech is a complex, not a homogeneous, unity. A number of facts in the linguistic development of the child indicate independent movement in the phonetic and the semantic spheres. We will point out two of the most important of these facts.
In mastering external speech, the child starts from one word, then connects two or three words; a little later, he advances from simple sentences to more complicated ones, and finally to coherent speech made up of series of such sentences; in other words, he proceeds from a part to the whole. In regard to meaning on the other hand, the first word of the child is a whole sentence. Semantically, the child starts from the whole, from a meaningful complex, and only later begins to master the separate semantic units, the meanings of words, and to divide his formerly undifferentiated thought into those units. The external and the semantic aspects of speech develop in opposite directions – one from the particular to the whole, from word to sentence, and the other from the whole to the particular, from sentence to word.
This in itself suffices to show how important it is to distinguish between the vocal and the semantic aspects of speech. Since they move in reverse directions, their development does not coincide, but that does not mean that they are independent of each other. On the contrary, their difference is the first stage of a close union. In fact, our example reveals their inner relatedness as clearly as it does their distinction. A child’s thought, precisely because it is born as a dim, amorphous whole, must find expression in a single word. As his thought becomes more differentiated, the child is less apt to express it in single words but constructs a composite whole. Conversely, progress in speech to the differentiated whole of a sentence helps the child’s thoughts to progress from a homogeneous whole to well-defined parts. Thought and word are not cut from one pattern. In a sense, there are more differences than likenesses between them. The structure of speech does not simply mirror the structure of thought that is why words cannot be put on by thought like a ready-made garment. Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech. It does not merely find expression in speech; It finds its reality and form. The semantic and the phonetic developmental processes are essentially one, precisely because of their reverse directions.
The second, equally important fact emerges at a later period of development. Piaget demonstrated that the child uses subordinate clauses with because, although, etc., long before he grasps the structures of meaning corresponding to these syntactic forms. Grammar precedes logic. Here, too, as in our previous example, the discrepancy does not exclude union but is, in fact, necessary for union.
In adults the divergence between the semantic and the phonetic aspects of speech is even more striking. Modern, psychologically oriented linguistics is familiar with this phenomenon, especially in regard too grammatical and psychological subject and predicate. For example, in the sentence “The clock fell,” emphasis and meaning may change in different situations. Suppose I notice that the clock has stopped and ask how this happened. The answer is, “The clock fell.” Grammatical and psychological subject coincide: “The clock” is the first idea in my consciousness; “fell” is what is said about the clock. But if I hear a crash in the next room and inquire what happened, and get the same answer, subject and predicate are psychologically reversed. I knew something had fallen – that is what we are talking about. “The clock” completes the idea. The sentence could be changed to: “What has fallen is the clock”; Then the grammatical and the psychological subject would coincide. In the prologue to his play Duke Ernst von Schwaben, Uhland says: “Grim scenes will pass before you.” Psychologically, “will pass” is the subject. The spectator knows he will see events unfold the additional idea, the predicate, remains in “grim scenes.” Uhland meant, “What will pass before your eyes are a tragedy.” Any part of a sentence may become the psychological predicate, the carrier of topical emphasis: on the other hand, entirely different meanings may lie hidden behind one grammatical structure. Accord between syntactical and psychological organisation is not as prevalent as we tend to assume – rather, it is a requirement that is seldom met. Not only subject and predicate, but grammatical gender, number, case, tense, degree, etc. has their psychological doubles. A spontaneous utterance wrong from the point of view of grammar, may have charm and aesthetic value. Absolute correctness is achieved only beyond natural language, in mathematics. Our daily speech continually fluctuates between the ideals of mathematical and of imaginative harmony.
We will illustrate the interdependence of the semantic and the grammatical aspects of language by citing two examples that show that changes in formal structure can entail far-reaching changes in meaning.
In translating the fable “La Cigale et la Fourmi,” Krylov substituted a dragonfly for La Fontaine’s grasshopper. In French Grasshopper is feminine and therefore well suited to symbolise a light-hearted, carefree attitude. The nuance would be lost in a literal translation, since in Russian Grasshopper is masculine. When he settled for dragonflies, which is feminine in Russian, Krylov disregarded the literal meaning in favour of the grammatical form required to render La Fontaine’s thought.
Tjutchev did the same in his translation of Heine’s poem about a fir and a palm. In German fir is masculine and palm feminine, and the poem suggests the love of a man for a woman. In Russian, both trees are feminine. To retain the implication, Tjutchev replaced the fir by a masculine cedar. Lermontov, in his more literal translation of the same poem, deprived it of these poetic overtones and gave it an essentially different meaning, more abstract and generalised. One grammatical detail may, on occasion, change the whole of which is to purport of what is said.
Behind words, there is the independent grammar of thought, the syntax of word meanings. The simplest utterance, far from reflecting a constant, rigid correspondence between sound and meaning, is really a process. Verbal expressions cannot emerge fully formed but must develop gradually. This complex process of transition from meaning to sound must itself be developed and perfected. The child must learn to distinguish between semantics and phonetics and understand the nature of the difference. At first he uses verbal forms and meanings without being conscious of them as separate. The word, to the child, is an integral part of the object it denotes. Such a conception seems to be characteristic of primitive linguistic consciousness. We all know the old story about the rustic who said he wasn’t surprised that savants with all their instruments could figure out the size of stars and their course – what baffled him was how they found out their names. Simple experiments show that preschool children “explain” the names of objects by their attributes. According to them, an animal is called “cow” because it has horns, “calves” because its horns are still small, “dog” because it is small and has no horns; an object is called “car” because it is not an animal. When asked whether one could interchange the names of objects, for instance call a cow “ink,” and ink “cow,” children will answer no, “because ink is used for writing, and the cow gives milk.” An exchange of names would mean an exchange of characteristic features, so inseparable is the connection between them in the child’s mind. In one experiment, the children were told that in a game a dog would be called “cow.” Here is a typical sample of questions and answers: Does a cow have horns? “Yes.” “But do you not remember that the cow is really a dog? Come now, does a dog have horns? “Sure, if it is a cow, if it is called cow, it has horns. That kind of dog has to have little horns.
We can see how difficult it is for children to separate the name of an object from its attributes, which cling to the name when it is transferred like possessions following their owner.
The fusion of the two planes of speech, semantic and vocal begins to break down as the child grows older, and the distance between them gradually increases. Each stage in the development of word meanings has its own specific interrelation of the two planes. A child’s ability to communicate through language is directly related to the differentiation of word meanings in his speech and consciousness.
To understand this, we must remember a basic characteristic of the structure of word meanings. In the semantic structure of a word, we distinguish between referent and meaning correspondingly, we distinguish a word’s nominative from its significative function. When we compare these structural and functional relations at the earliest, middle, and advanced stages of development, we find the following genetic regularity: In the beginning, only the nominative functions exist, and semantically, only the unbiased objective becomes the reference, and independent of naming, and meaning independent of reference, appear later and develop along the paths we have attempted to trace and describe.
Only when this development is completed does the child become fully able to formulate his own thought and to understand the speech of others. Until then, his usage of words coincides with that of adults in its objective reference but not in its meaning.
We must probe still deeper and explore the plane of inner speech lying beyond the semantic plane. We will discuss here some of the data of the special investigation we have made of it. The relationship of thought and word cannot be understood in all its complexity without a clear understanding of the psychological nature of inner speech. Yet, of all the problems connected with thought and language, this is perhaps the most complicated, beset as it is with terminological and other misunderstandings.
The term inner speech, or endoplasm, has been applied to various phenomena, and authors argue about different things that they call by the same name. Originally, inner speech seems to have been understood as verbal memory. An example would be the silent recital of a poem known by heart. In that case, inner speech differs from vocal speech only as the idea or image of an object differs from the real object. It was in this sense that inner speech was understood by the French authors who tried to find out how words were reproduced in memory – whether as auditory, visual, motor, or synthetic images. We will see that word memory is indeed one of the constituent elements of inner speech but not all of it.
In a second interpretation, inner speech is seen as truncated external speech - as “speech minus sound” (Mueller) or “sub-vocal speech” (Watson). Bekhterev defined it as a speech reflex inhibited in its motor part. Such an explanation is by no measure of sufficiency. Silent “pronouncing” of words is not equivalent to the total process of inner speech.
The third definition is, on the contrary, too broad. To Goldstein, the term covers everything that precedes the motor act of speaking, including Wundt’s “motives of speech” and the indefinable, non-sensory and non-motor specific speech experience -, i.e., the whole interior aspect of any speech activity. It is hard to accept the equation of inner speech with an inarticulate inner experience in which the separate identifiable structural planes are dissolved without trace. This central experience is common to all linguistic activity, and for this reason alone Goldstein’s interpretation does not fit that specific, unique function that alone deserves the name of inner speech. Logically developed, Goldstein’s view must lead to the thesis that inner speech is not speech at all but rather an intellectual and affective-volitional activity, since it includes the motives of speech and the thought that is expressed in words.
To get a true picture of inner speech, one must embark upon that which is a specific formation, with its own laws and complex relations to the other forms of speech activity. Before we can study its relation to thought, on the one hand, and to speech, on the other, we must determine its special characteristics and function.
Inner speech allows one to speak for one’s external oration, for which of the others would be surprising, if such a difference in function did not affect the structure of the two kinds of speech. Absence of vocalisation per se is only a consequence of the specific nature of inner speech, which is neither an antecedent of external speech nor its reproduction in memory but is, in a sense, the opposite of external speech. The latter is the turning of thought into words, its materialisation and objectification. With inner speech, the process is reversed: Speech turns into inward thought. Consequently, their structures must differ.
The area of inner speech is one of the most difficult to investigate. It remained almost inaccessible to experiments until ways were found to apply the genetic method of experimentation. Piaget was the first to pay attention to the child’s egocentric speech and to see its theoretical significance, but he remained blind to the most important trait of egocentric speech - its genetic connection with inner speech – and this warped his interpretation of its function and structure. We made that relationship the central problem of our study and thus were able to investigate the nature of inner speech with unusual completeness. A number of considerations and observations led us to conclude that egocentric speech is a stage of development preceding inner speech: Both fulfil intellectual functions; Their structures are similar; egocentric speech disappears at school age, when inner speech begins to develop. From all this we infer that one change into the other.
If this transformation does take place, then egocentric speech provides the key to the study of inner speech. One advantage of approaching inner speech through egocentric speech is its accessibility to experimentation and observation. It is still vocalised, audible speech, i.e., external in its mode of expression, but at the same time inner speech in function and structure. To study an internal process, in that it is necessary to externalise it experimentally, by connecting it with some outer activity; barely then is objective functional analysis possible. Egocentric speech is, in fact, a natural experiment of this type.
This method has another great advantage: Since egocentric speech can be studied at the time when some of its characteristics are waning and new ones forming, we are able to judge which traits are essential to inner speech and which are only temporary, and thus to determine the goal of this movement from egocentric to inner speech -, i.e., the nature of inner speech.
Before we go on to the results obtained by this method, we will briefly discuss the nature of egocentric speech, stressing the differences between our theory and Piaget’s. Piaget contends that the child’s egocentric speech is a direct expression of the egocentrism of his thought, which in turn is a compromise between the primary autism of his thinking and its gradual socialisation. As the child grows older, and as autism overturns the associative remembers affiliated to socialisation progresses, leading to the waning of egocentrism in his thinking and speech.
In Piaget’s conception, the child in his egocentric speech does not adapt himself to the thinking of adults. His thought remains entirely egocentric; This makes his talk incomprehensibly to others. Egocentric speech has no function in the child’s realistic thinking or activity, but it merely accompanies them. And since it is an expression of egocentric thought, it disappears together with the child’s egocentrism. From its climax at the beginning of the child’s development, egocentric speech drops to zero on the threshold of school age. Its history is one of involution rather than evolution. It has no future.
In our conception, egocentric speech is a phenomenon of the transition from interpsychic to intrapsychic functioning, i.e., from the social, collective activity of the child to his more individualised activity - a pattern of development common to all the higher psychological functions. Speech for oneself originates through differentiation from speech for others. Since the main course of the child’s development is one of gradual individualisation, this tendency is reflected in the function and structure of his speech.
The function of egocentric speech is similar to that of inner speech: It does not merely accompany the child’s activity; it serves mental orientation, conscious understanding; it helps in overcoming difficulties; it is speech for oneself, intimately and usefully connected with the child’s thinking. Its fate is very different from that described by Piaget. Egocentric speech develops along a rising not a declining, curve; it goes through an evolution, not an involution. In the end, it becomes inner speech.
Our hypothesis has several advantages over Piaget’s: It explains the function and development of egocentric speech and, in particular, its sudden increase when the child’s face’s difficulties that demand consciousness and reflection – a fact uncovered by our experiments and which Piaget’s theory cannot explain. But the greatest advantage of our theory is that it supplies a satisfying answer to a paradoxical situation described by Piaget himself. To Piaget, the quantitative drop in egocentric speech as the child grows older means the withering of that form of speech. If that were so, its structural peculiarities might also be expected to decline; it is hard to believe that the process would affect only its quantity, and not its inner structure. The child’s thought becomes infinitely less egocentric between the ages of three and seven. If the characteristics of egocentric speech that make it incomprehensible to others are indeed rooted in egocentrism, they should become less apparent as that form of speech becomes less frequent; Egocentric speech should approach social speech and become ever more intelligible. Yet what are the facts? Is the talk of a three-year-old harder to follow than that of a seven-year-old? Our investigation established that the traits of egocentric speech that makes for inscrutability are at their lowest point at three and at their peak at seven. They develop in a reverse direction to the frequency of egocentric speech. While the latter keeps declining and reaches the point of zero at school age, the structural characteristics become more pronounced.
This throws a new light on the quantitative decrease in egocentric speech, which is the cornerstone of Piaget’s thesis.
What does this decrease mean? The structural peculiarities of speech for oneself and its differentiation from external speech increase with age. What is it that diminishes? Only one of its aspects verbalizes. Does this mean that egocentric speech as a whole is dying out? We believe that it does not, for how then could we explain the growth of the functional and structural traits of egocentric speech? On the other hand, their growth is perfectly compatible with the decrease of vocalisation - indeed, clarifies its meaning. Its rapid dwindling and the equally rapid growth of the other characteristics are contradictory in appearance only.
To explain this, let us start from an undeniable, experimentally established fact. The structural and functional qualities of egocentric speech become more marked as the child develops. At three, the difference between egocentric and social speech matches that to zero; At seven, we have speech that in structure and function is totally unlike social speech. A differentiation of the two speech functions has taken place. This is a fact - and facts are notoriously hard to refute.
Once we accept this, everything else falls into place. If the developing structural and functional peculiarities of egocentric speech progressively isolate it from external speech, then its vocal aspect must fade away. This is exactly what happens between three and seven years. With the progressive isolation of speech for oneself, its vocalisation becomes unnecessary and meaningless and, because of its growing structural peculiarities, also impossible. Speech for oneself cannot find expression in external speech. The more independent and autonomous egocentric speech becomes, the poorer it grows in its external manifestations. In the end it separates itself entirely from speech for others, ceases to be vocalised, and thus appears to die out.
But this is only an illusion. To interpret the sinking coefficient of egocentric speech as a sign that this kind of speech is dying out is like saying that the child stops counting when he ceases to use his fingers and starts adding in his head. In reality, behind the symptoms of dissolution lies a progressive development, the birth of a new speech form.
The decreasing vocalisation of egocentric speech denotes a developing abstraction from sound, the child’s new faculty to “think words” instead of pronouncing them. This is the positive meaning of the sinking coefficient of egocentric speech. The downward curve indicates development toward inner speech.
We can see that all the known facts about the functional, structural, and genetic characteristics of self-indulgent or egocentric speech points to one thing: It develops in the direction of inner speech. Its developmental history can be understood only as a gradual unfolding of the traits of inner speech.
We believe that this corroborates our hypothesis about the origin and nature of egocentric speech. To turn our hypothesis into a certainty, we must devise an experiment capable of showing which of the two interpretations is correct. What are the data for this critical experiment?
Let us restate the theories between which we must decide as for Piaget believes, that egocentric speech stems from the insufficient socialisation of speech and that its only development is decrease and eventual death. Its culmination lies in the past. Inner speech is something new brought in from the outside along with socialisation. We demonstrated that in egocentric speech stems from the insufficient individualisation of primary social speech. Its culmination lies in the future. It develops into inner speech.
To obtain evidence for one or the other view, we must place the child alternately in experimental situations encouraging social speech and in situations discouraging it, and see how these changes affect egocentric speech. We consider this an experimentum crucis for the following reasons.
If the child’s egocentric talk results from the egocentrism of his thinking and its insufficient socialisation, then any weakening of the social elements in the experimental setup, any factor contributing to the child’s isolation from the group, must lead to a sudden increase in egocentric speech. But if the latter results from an insufficient differentiation of speech for oneself from speech for others, then the same changes must cause it to decrease.
We took as the starting point of our experiment three of Piaget’s own observations: (1) Egocentric speech occurs only in the presence of other children engaged in the same activity, and not when the child is alone; i.e., it is a collective monologue. (2) The child is under the illusion that his egocentric talk, directed to nobody, is understood by those who surround him. (3) Egocentric speech has the character of external speech: It is audible or whispered. These are certainly not chance peculiarities. From the child’s own point of view, egocentric speech is not yet separated from social speech. It occurs under the subjective and objective conditions of social speech and may be considered a correlate of the insufficient isolation of the child’s individual consciousness from the social whole.
In our first series of experiments, we tried to destroy the illusion of being understood. After measuring the child’s coefficient of egocentric speech in a situation similar to that of Piaget’s experiments, we put him into a new situation: Either with deaf-mute children or with children speaking a foreign language. In all other respects the setup remained the same. The coefficient of egocentric speech dropped to zero in the majority of cases, and in the rest to one-eighth of the previous figure, on the average. This proves that the illusion of being understood is not a mere epiphenomenon of egocentric speech but is functionally connected with it. Our results must seem paradoxical from the point of view of Piaget’s theory: The weaker the child’s contact is with the group – amounting to less of the social situation forces’ him to adjust his thoughts to others and to use social speech – that there is more as freely should be the egocentrism of his thinking and speech manifest itself. But from the point of view of our hypothesis, the meaning of these findings is clear: Egocentric speech, springing from the lack of differentiation of speech for oneself from speech for others, disappears when the feeling of being understood, essential for social speech, is absent.
In the second series of experiments, the variable factor was the possibility of some collective monologue. Having measured the child’s coefficient of egocentric speech in a situation permitting collective monologue, we put him into a situation excluding it - in a group of children who were strangers to him, or by his being of self, at which point, a separate table in a corner of the room, for which he worked entirely alone, even the experimenter leaving the room. The results of this series agreed with the first results. The exclusion of the group monologue caused a drop in the coefficient of egocentric speech, though not such a striking one as in the first case - seldom to zero and, on the average, to one-sixth of the original figure. The different methods of precluding a collective characterize monologues that were not equally effective in reducing the coefficient of egocentric speech. The trend, however, was obvious in all the variations of the experiment. The exclusion of the collective factor, instead of giving full freedom to egocentric speech, depressed it. Our hypothesis was once more confirmed.
In the third series of experiments, the variable factor was the vocal quality of egocentric speech. Just outside the laboratory where the experiment was in progress, an orchestra played so loudly, or so much noise was made, that it drowned out not only the voices of others but the child’s own; in a variant of the experiment, the child was expressly forbidden to talk loudly and allowed to talk only in whispers. Once again the coefficient of egocentric speech went down, the relation to the original unit being the different methods were not equally effective, but the basic trend was invariably present.
The purpose of all three series of experiments was to eliminate those characteristics of egocentric speech that bring it close to social speech. We found that this always led to the dwindling of egocentric speech. It is logical, then, to assume that egocentric speech is a form developing out of social speech and not yet separated from it in its manifestation, though already distinct in function and structure.
The disagreement between us and Piaget on this point will be made quite clear by the following example: I am sitting at my desk talking to a person who is behind me and whom I cannot see; he leaves the room without my noticing it, and I continue to talk, under the illusion that he listens and understands. Outwardly, I am talking with myself and for myself, but psychologically my speech is social. From the point of view of Piaget’s theory, the opposite happens in the case of the child: His egocentric talk is for and with himself; it only has the appearance of social speech, just as my speech gave the false impression of being egocentric. From our point of view, the whole situation is much more complicated than that: Subjectively, the child’s egocentric speech already has its own peculiar function - to that extent, it is independent from social speech; Yet its independence is not complete because it is not felt as inner speech and is not distinguished by the child from speech for others. Objectively, also, it is different from social speech but again not entirely, because it functions only within social situations. Both subjectively and objectively, egocentric speech represents a transition from speech for others to speech for oneself. It already has the function of inner speech but remains similar to social speech in its expression.
The investigation of egocentric speech has paved the way to the understanding of inner speech, while our experiments convinced us that inner speech must be regarded, not as speech minus sound, but as an entirely separate speech function. Its main distinguishing trait is its peculiar syntax. Compared with external speech, inner speech appears disconnected and incomplete.
This is not a new observation. All the students of inner speech, even those who approached it from the behaviouristic standpoint, noted this trait. The method of genetic analysis permits us to go beyond a mere description of it. We applied this method and found that as egocentric speech transforms by its showing tendencies toward an altogether specific form of abbreviation: Namely, omitting the subject of a sentence and all words connected with it, while preserving the predicate. This tendency toward predication appears in all our experiments with such regularity that we must assume it to be the basic syntactic form of inner speech.
It may help us to understand this tendency if we recall certain situations in which external speech shows a similar structure. Pure predication occurs in external speech in two cases: Either as an answer or when the subject of the sentence is known beforehand to all concerned. The answer to “Would you like a cup of tea?” is never “No, I do not want a cup of tea “ but a simple “No.?” Obviously, such a sentence is possible only because its subject is tacitly understood by both parties. To “Has your brother read this book?” No one ever replies, “Yes, my brother has read this book.” The answer is a short “Yes,” or “Yes, he has.” Now let us imagine that several people are waiting for a bus. No one will say, on seeing the bus approach, “The bus for which we are waiting is coming.” The sentence is likely to be an abbreviated “Coming,” or some such expression, because the subject is plain from the situation. Exceptionally hold to a frequent shortened sentence causing confusion. The listener may relate the sentence to a subject foremost in his own mind, not the one meant by the speaker. If the thoughts of two people coincide, perfect understanding can be achieved through the use of mere predicates, but if they are thinking about different things they are bound to misunderstand each other.
Having examined abbreviation in external speech, we can now return enriched to the same phenomenon in inner speech, where it is not an exception but the rule. It will be instructive to compare abbreviation in oral, inner, and written speech. Communication in writing relies on the formal meanings of words and requires a much greater number of words than oral speech to convey the same idea. It is addressed to an absent person who rarely has in mind the same subject as the writer. Therefore, it must be fully deployed; Syntactic differentiation is at a maximum, and expressions are used that would seem unnatural in conversation. Griboedov’s “He talks like writing” refers to the droll effect of elaborate constructions in daily speech.
The multifunctional nature of language, which has recently attracted the close attention of linguists, had already been pointed out by Humboldt in relation to poetry and prose – two forms very different in function and in the means they use. Poetry, according to Humboldt, is inseparable from music, while prose depends entirely on language and is dominated by thought. Consequently, each has its own diction, grammar, and syntax. This is a conception of primary importance, although neither Humboldt nor those who encourage in developing his thought fully realised its implications. They distinguished only between poetry and prose, and within the latter between the exchange of ideas and ordinary conversation, i.e., the mere exchange of news or conventional chatter. There are other important functional distinctions in speech. One of them is the distinction between dialogue and monologue, as if written through the avenue of inner speech representation whereby it seems profoundly definitely strung by the monologue; The totalities of expression are uttered of some oral fashion as their linguistic manner as to be inferred by the spoken exchange that might be correlated by speech, in that in most cases, are contained through dialogue.
Dialogue always presupposes that in accordance with the collaborator’s formality that holds within the forming of knowledge, which it is maintained by its subject and is likely to be approved by an abbreviated speech and, under certain conditions, purely predicative sentences. It also presupposes that each person can see his partners, their facial expressions and gestures, and hear the tone of their voices. We have already discussed abbreviation and will consider here only its auditory aspect, using a classical example from Dostoevski’s, The Diary of a Writer, to show how much intonation helps the subtly differentiated understanding of a word’s meaning.
Dostoevski relates a conversation of drunks that entirely consisted of one unprintable word: “One Sunday night I happened to walk for some fifteen paces next to a group of six drunken young labourers, and I suddenly realised that all thoughts, feelings and even a whole chain of reasoning could be expressed by that one noun, which is moreover extremely short. One young fellow said it harshly and forcefully, to express his utter contempt for whatever it was they had all been talking about. Another answered with the same noun but in a quite different tone and sense - doubting that the negative attitude of the first one was warranted. A third suddenly became incensed against the first and roughly intruded on the conversation, excitedly shouting the same noun, this time as a curse and obscenity. Here the second fellow interfered again, angry with the third, the aggressor, and restraining him, in the sense of “Presently, as to implicate the now in question why to do you have to butt in, we were discussing things quietly and here you come and start swearing. And he told this whole thought in one word, the same venerable word, except that he also raised his hand and put it on the third fellow’s shoulder. All at once a fourth, the youngest of the group, who had kept silent till then, probably having suddenly found a solution to the original difficulty that had started the argument, raised his hand in a transport of joy and shouted . . . Eureka, do you think? I have it? No, not eureka and not I have it; he repeated the unprintable noun, one word, merely one word, but with ecstasy, in a shriek of delight - which was apparently too strong, because the sixth and the oldest, a glum-looking fellow, did not like it and cut the infantile joy of the other one short, addressing him in a sullen, exhortative bass and repeating . . . yes, still the same noun, forbidden in the presence of ladies but which this time clearly meant “What are you yelling yourself hoarse for? So, without uttering a single other word, they repeated that one beloved word is six times in a row, and only one after another, and understood one another completely.” [The Diary of a Writer]
Inflection reveals the psychological context within which a word is to be understood. In Dostoevski’s story, it was contemptuous negation in one case, doubt in another, anger in the third. When the context is as clear as in this example, it really becomes possible to convey all thoughts, feelings, and even a whole chain of reasoning by one word.
In written speech, as tone of voice and knowledge of subject are excluded, we are obliged to use many more words, and to use them more exactly. Written speech is the most elaborate form of speech.
Some linguists consider dialogue the natural form of oral speech, the one in which language fully reveals its nature, and monologue to a greater degree for being artificial. Psychological investigation leaves no doubt that monologue is indeed the higher, more complicated form, and of later historical development. At present, however, we are interested in comparing them only in regard with the tendency toward abbreviation.
The speed of oral speech is unfavourable to a complicated process of formulation, but it does not leave time for deliberation and choice. Dialogue implies immediate unpremeditated utterance. It consists of replies, repartee; it is a chain of reactions. Monologue, by comparison, is a complex formation; the linguistic elaboration can be attended too leisurely and consciously.
In written speech, lacking situational and expressive supports, communication must be achieved only through words and their combinations; this requires the speech activity to take complicated forms - hence the use of first drafts. The evolution from the draft to the final copy reflects our mental process. Planning has an important part in written speech, even when we do not actually write out a draft. Usually we say to ourselves what we are going to write; This is also a draft, though in thought only. As we tried to show in the preceding chapter, this mental draft is inner speech. Since inner speech functions as a draft not only in written but also in oral speech, we will now compare both these forms with inner speech in respect to the tendency toward abbreviation and predication.
This tendency, never found in written speech and only some times in oral speech, arises in inner speech always. Predication is the natural form of inner speech, psychologically as it consists of predicates only. It is as much a law of inner speech to omit subjects as it is a law of written speech to contain both subjects and predicates.
The key to this experimentally established fact is the invariable, inevitable presence in inner speech of the factors that facilitate pure predication: We know what we are thinking about -, i.e., we always know the subject and the situation. Psychological contact between partners in a conversation may establish a mutual perception leading to the understanding of abbreviated speech. In inner speech, the “mutual” perception is always there, in absolute form; Therefore, a practically wordless “communisation” of even the most complicated thoughts is the rule. The predominance of predication is a product of development. In the beginning, egocentric speech is identical in structure with social speech, but in the process of its transformation into inner speech it gradually becomes less thorough and coherent as it becomes governed by the entire predicative syntax. Experiments show clearly how and why the new syntax takes hold. The child talks about the things he sees or hears or does at a given moment. As a result, he tends to leave out the subject and all words connected with it, condensing his speech frequently until only predicates are left. The more differentiated the specific function of egocentric speech becomes, the more pronounced are its syntactic peculiarities - simplification and predication. Hand in hand with this change goes decreasing vocalisation. When we converse with ourselves, we need even fewer words than Kitty and Levin did. Inner speech is speech almost without words.
With syntax and sound reduced to a minimum, meaning is more than ever in the forefront. Inner speech works with semantics, not phonetics. The specific semantic structure of inner speech also contributes to abbreviation. The syntax of meanings in inner speech is no less original than its grammatical syntax. Our investigation established three main semantic peculiarities of inner speech.
The first and basic one is the preponderance of the sense of a word over its meaning, and a distinction we accredit to Paulhan. The sense of a word, according to him, is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole, which has several zones of unequal stability. Means is only one of the zones of sense, are the most stable and precise area. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense. Meaning remains stable throughout the changes of sense. The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, no more than a potentiality that finds diversified realisation in speech.
The last words of the previously mentioned fable by Krylov, “The Dragonfly and the Ant,” is a good illustration of the difference between sense and meaning. The words “Go and dances” comprise of a definite and constant meaning, but in the context of the fable they acquire a much broader intellectual and affective sense. They mean both to “Enjoy yourself” and “Perish.” This enrichment of words by the sense they gain from the context is the fundamental law of the dynamics of word meanings. A frame in the circumstance of having to a context, it means both are more and fewer than the same word in isolation: More, because it acquires new content; less, because its meaning is limited and narrowed by the context. The sense of a word, says Paulhan, is a complex, mobile, protean phenomenon; it changes in different minds and situations and is almost unlimited. A word derives its sense from the sentence, which in turn gets its sense from the paragraph, the paragraph from the book, the book from all the works of the author.
Paulhan rendered a further service to psychology by analysing the relation between word and sense and showing that they are much more independent of each other than word and meaning. It has long been known that words can change their sense. Recently it was pointed out that sense can change words or, better, that ideas often change their names. Just as the sense of a word is connected with the whole word, and not with its single sounds, the sense of a sentence is connected with the whole sentence, and not with its individual words. Therefore, a word may sometimes be replaced by another without any change in sense. Words and sense are relatively independent of each other.
In inner speech, the predominance of sense over meaning, of the sentences over communicative words as their formalities and of context over sentences that are the rule.
This leads us to the other semantic peculiarities of inner speech. Both concern word combination. One of them is rather like agglutination, and a way of combining words fairly frequents in some languages and comparatively rare in others. German often forms one noun out of several words or phrases. In some primitive languages, such adhesion of words is a general rule. When several words are merged into one word, the new word not only expresses a rather complex idea but designates all the separate elements contained in that idea. Because the stress is always on the main root or idea, such languages are easy to understand. The egocentric speech of the child displays some analogous phenomena. As egocentric speech approaches inner speech, the child uses agglutination frequently as a way of forming compound words to express complex ideas.
The third basic semantic peculiarity of inner speech is the way in which senses of words combine and unite - a process governed by different laws from those governing combinations of meanings. When we observed this singular way of uniting words in egocentric speech, we called it “influx of sense.” The senses of different words flow into one another - literally “influence” one and another - so that the earlier ones are contained in, and modify, the later ones. Thus, a word that keeps recurring in a book or a poem sometimes absorbs all the variety of sense contained in it and becomes, in a way, equivalent to the work itself. The title of literary works expresses its content and completes its sense to a much greater degree than does the name of a painting or of a piece of music. Titles like Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Anna Karenina illustrate this very clearly - the whole sense of its operative word is contained in one name. Another excellent example is Gogol’s Dead Souls. Originally, the title referred to dead serfs whose names had not yet been removed from the official lists and who could still be bought and sold as if they were alive. It is in this sense that the words are used throughout the book, which is built up around this traffic in the dead. But through their intimate relationship with which the work as a whole, as these two words acquire the diversity of new and changing significance, an infinitely broader sense. When we reach the end of the book, “Dead Souls” means to us not so much the defunct serfs as all the characters in the story, who are alive physically but dead spiritually.
In inner speech, the phenomenon reaches its peak. A single word is so saturated with sense that many words would be required to explain it in external speech. No wonder about why egocentric speech is incomprehensible to others. Watson says that inner speech would be incomprehensible even if it could be recorded. Its opaqueness is further increased by a related phenomenon that, incidentally, Tolstoy noted in external speech: In Childhood, Adolescence, and Youth, he describes how between people in close psychological contact words acquire special meanings understood only by the initiated. In inner speech, the same kind of idiom develops – the kind that is difficult to translate into the language of external speech.
With this we will conclude our survey of the peculiarities of inner speech, which we first observed in our investigation of egocentric speech. In looking for comparisons in external speech, we found that the latter already contain, potentially at least, the traits typical of inner speech; Predication, decreases the vocalisation, and preponderance of sense over meaning, agglutinations, etc., appear under certain conditions also in external speech. This, we believe, is the best confirmation of our hypothesis that inner speech originates through the differentiation of egocentric speech from the child’s primary social speech.
All our observations indicate that inner speech is an autonomous speech function. We can confidently regard it as a distinct plane of verbal thought. It is evident that the transition from inner to external speech is not a simple translation from one language into another. It cannot be achieved by merely vocalising silent speech. It is a complex, dynamic process involving the transformation of the predicative, idiomatic structure of inner speech into syntactically articulated speech intelligible to others.
We can now return to the definition of inner speech that we proposed before presenting our analysis. Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech, but it is a function in itself. It remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought, as two more or less sensible stables that are more or less firmly delineated components of verbal thought. Its true nature and place can be understood only after examining the next plane of verbal thought the one still more inward than inner speech.
That plane is thought itself. As we have said, every thought creates a connection, fulfils a function, solves a problem. The flow of thought is not accompanied by a simultaneous unfolding of speech. The two processes are not identical, and there is no rigid correspondence between the units of thought and speech. This is especially obvious when a thought process miscarries - when, as Dostoevski put it, a thought “will not enter words.” Thought has its own structure, and the transition from it to speech is no easy matter. The theatre faced the problem of the thought behind the words before psychology did. In teaching his system of acting, Stanislavsky required the actors to uncover the “subtext” of their lines in a play. In Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit, the hero, Chatsky, says to the hero, who maintains that she has never stopped thinking of him, “Thrice blessed who believes. Believing warms the heart.” Stanislavsky interpreted this as “Let us stop this mutter”; However, to stop, it could just as well be interpreted as “I do not believe you. You say it to comfort me,” or as “Don’t you see how you torment me? I wish I could believe you. That would be bliss.” Every sentence that we say in real life has some kind of subtext, a thought hidden behind it. In the examples we gave earlier of the lack of coincidence between grammatical and psychological subject and predicate, we did not pursue our analysis to the end. Just as one sentence may express different thoughts, one thought may be expressed in different sentences. For instance, “The clock fell,” in answer to the question “Why did the clock stop?” Could mean? “It is not my fault that the clock is out of order; it fell.” The same thought, for determining the self justification, could take the form of “It is not my habit to touch other people’s things. I was just dusting here,” or a number of others.
Though, unlike speech, does not consist of separate units. When I wish to communicate the thought that today I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street, I do not see every item separately: the boy, the shirt, its blue colour, his running, the absence of shoes. I conceive of all this in one thought, but I put it into separate words. A speaker often takes several minutes to disclose one thought. In his mind the whole thought is present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively. A thought may be compared with a cloud shedding a shower of words. Precisely because thought does not have its automatic counterpart in words, the transition from thought to word leads through meaning. In our speech, there is always the hidden thought, the subtext. Because a direct transition from thought to word is impossible, there have always been laments about the inexpressibility of thought: “How shall the heart express itself? How shall another understand?”
Direct communication between minds is impossible, not only physically but psychologically. Communication can be achieved only in a roundabout way. Thought must pass first through meanings and then through words.
We come now to the last step in our analysis of verbal thought. Though to be itself is too engendered by motivation, i.e., by our desires and needs, our interests and emotions. Behind every thought there is an affective-volitional tendency, which holds the answer to the last “why” in the analysis of thinking. A true and full understanding of another’s thought is possible only when we understand its affective-volitional basis. We will illustrate this by an example already used: The interpretation of parts in a play. Stanislavsky, in his instructions to actors, listed the motives behind the words of their parts.
To understand another’s speech, it is not sufficient to understand his words, but we must understand his thought. But even that is not enough - we must also know its motivation. No psychological analysis of an utterance is complete until that plane is reached.
In the end, the verbal thought appeared as a complex, dynamic entity, and the relation of thought and word within it as a movement through a series of planes. Our analysis followed the process from the outermost to the innermost plane. In reality, the development of verbal thought takes the opposite course: From the motive that engenders a thought to the shaping of the thought, first in inner speech, then in meanings of words, and finally in words. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that this is the only road from thought to word. The development may stop at any point in its complicated course; An infinite variety of movements back and forth, of ways still unknown to us, is possible. A study of these manifold variations lies beyond the scope of our present task.
Here we have wished to study the inner workings of thought and speech, hidden from direct observation. Meaning and the whole inward aspects of language, the position of which its turning toward the person, is not toward the outer world, have been so far an almost unknown territory. No matter how they were interpreted, the relations between thought and word were always considered constant, established forever. Our investigation has shown that they are, on the contrary, delicate, changeable relations between processes, which arise during the development of verbal thought. We did not intend to, and could not, exhaust the subject of verbal thought. We tried only to give a general conception of the infinite complexity of this dynamic structure - a conception starting from experimentally documented facts.
To association psychology, thought and its inscription of words was united by external bonds, similar to the bonds between two nonsense syllables. Gestalt psychology introduced the concept of structural bonds but, like the older theory, did not account for the specific relations between thought and word. All the other theories grouped themselves around two poles - either the behaviourist concept of thought as speech minus sound or the idealistic view, held by the Wuerzburg school and Bergson, that thought could be “pure,” unrelated to language, and that it was distorted by words. Tjutchev’s “A thought once uttered is a lie” could well serve as an epigraph for the latter group. Whether inclining toward pure naturalism or extreme idealism, all these theories have one trait in common - their antihistorical bias. They study thought and speech without any reference to their developmental history.
A historical theory of inner speech can deal with this immense and complex problem. The relation between thought and word is a living process; Thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow. The connection between them, however, is not a preformed and constant one. It emerges in the course of development, and it evolves. To the Biblical “In the beginning was the Word,” Goethe makes Faust reply, “In the beginning was the deed.” The intent here is to detract from the value of the word, but we can accept this version if we emphasise it differently: In the beginning was the deed. The word was not the beginning, and action was there first; it is the end of development, crowning the deed.
We cannot, without mentioning the perspectives that our investigation opens. We studied the inward aspects of speech, which were as unknown to science as the other side of the moon. We showed that a generalised reflection of reality is the basic characteristic of words. This aspect of the word brings us to the threshold of a wider and deeper subject - the general problem of consciousness. Though and language, for which reflect reality in a way different from that of perception, that which is the key to the nature of human consciousness. Words play a central part not only in the development of thought but in the historical growth of consciousness as a whole. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness
The hermetic tradition has long been concerned with the relationship between the inner world of our consciousness and the outer world of nature, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, below and the above, the material and the spiritual, the centric and the peripheral. The hermetic world view held by such as Robert Fludd, having conceived by some great chain of being linking our inner spark of consciousness with all the facets of the Great World. There were grands to see the platonic metaphysical clockwork, as it were, through which our inner world was linked by means of a hierarchy of beings and planes to the highest unity of the Divine.
This view though comforting is philosophically unsound, and the developments in thought since the early 17th century have made such a hermetic world view seems as untenable and still philosophically naive. It is impossible to try to argue the case for such an hermetic metaphysic with anyone who has had philosophical training, for they will quickly and mercilessly reveal deep philosophical contradictions in this world view.
So do we now have to abandon such a beautiful and spiritual world view and adopt the prevailing reductionist materialist conception of the world that has become accepted in the intellectual tradition of the West?
I am not so sure. There still remains the problem of our consciousness and its relationship to our material form - the Mind / Brain problem. Behavioural psychologists such as Skinner tried to reduce this to one level - the material brain - by viewing the mental or consciousness events from the outside for being merely, stimulus-response loops. This simplistic view works well for basic reflex actions - "I itch therefore I scratch" - but dissolves into absurdity when applied to any real act of the creative intellect or artistic imagination. Skinners’ determinism collapses when confronted with trying to explain the creative source of our consciousness revealing itself in an artist at work or a mathematician discovering through his thinking a new property of an abstract mathematical system. The psychologists' attempts to reduce the mind/brain problem to a merely material one of neurophysiology obviously failed. The idea that consciousness is merely a secretion or manifestation of a complex net of electrical impulses working within the mass of cells in our brain, is now discredited. The advocates of this view are strongly motivated by a desire to reduce the world to one level, to get rid of the necessity for "consciousness,” "mind" or "spirit" as a real facet of the world.
This materialistic determinism in which everything in the world (including the phenomenon of consciousness) can be reduced to simple interactions on a physical/chemical level, belongs really to the nineteenth century scientific landscape. Nineteenth century science was founded upon a "Newtonian Absolute Physics" which provided a description of the world as an interplay of forces obeying immutable laws and following a predetermined pattern. This is the "billiard ball" view of the world - one in which, provided we are given the initial state of the system (the layout of the balls on the table, and the exact trajectory, momentum and other parameters of the cue ball, etc.) then theoretically the exact layout after each interaction can be precisely calculated to absolute precision. All could be reduced to the determinate interplay of matter obeying the immutable laws of physics. The concept of the "spiritual" was unnecessary, even "mind" was dispensable, and "God" of course had no place in this scheme of things.
This comfortably solid "Newtonian" world view of the materialists has however been entirely undermined by the new physics of the twentieth century, and in particular through Quantum Theory. Physicists investigating the properties of sub-atomic matter, found that the deterministic Newtonian absolutism broke down at the foundation level of matter. An element of probability had to be introduced into the physicists' calculations, and each sub-atomic event was itself inherently unpredictably - one could only ascribe a probability to the outcome. The simple billiard ball model collapsed at the sub-atomic level. For if the billiard table was intended as a picture of a small region of space on the atomic scale and each ball was to be a particle (an electron, proton, or neutron, etc.), then physicists came to realise that this model could not represent reality on that level. For in Quantum theory one could not define the position and momentum of a particle both at the same moment. As soon as we establish the parameters of motion of a body, its position is uncertain and can only be described mathematically as a wave of probability. Our billiard table dissolved into a fluid ever-moving undulating surface, with each ball at one moment focussed to a point then at another dissolving and spreading itself out over an area of the space of the table. Trying to play billiards at this sub-atomic level was rather difficult.
In the Quantum picture of the world, each individual event cannot be determined exactly, but has to be described by a wave of probability. There is a kind of polarity between the position and energy of any particle in which they cannot be simultaneously determined. This was not a failing of experimental method but a property of the kinds of mathematical structures that physicists have to use to describe this realm of the world. The famous equation of Quantum theory embodying Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is: Planck's constant = (uncertainty in energy) x (uncertainty in position)
Thus if we try to fix the position of the particle (i.e., reduce the uncertainty in its position to a small factor) then as a consequence of this equation the uncertainty in the energy must increase to balance this, and therefore we cannot find a value for the energy of the particle simultaneous with fixing its position. Planck's constant being very small means that these infractions as based of the factors only become dominant on the extremely small scale, which are within the realm of the atom.
So we see that the Quantum picture of reality has at its foundation a non-deterministic view of the fundamental building Forms of matter. Of course, when dealing with large masses of particles these quantum indeterminacies effectively cancel each other out, and physicists can determine and predict the state of large systems. Obviously planets, suns, galaxies being composed of large numbers of particles do not exhibit any uncertainty in their position and energies, for when we look at such large aggregates as some of its totality, the total quantum uncertainty is a systems reduction as placed by zero, and in respect to their large scale properties can effectively be treated as deterministic systems.
Thus on the large scale we can effectively apply a deterministic physics, but when we wish to look in detail at the properties of the sub-atomic realm, lying at the root and foundation of our world, we must enter a domain of quantum uncertainties and find the neat ordered picture dissolving into a sea of ever flowing forces that we cannot tie down or set into fixed patterns.
Some people when faced with this picture of reality find comfort in dismissing the quantum world as having little to do with the "real world" of appearances. We do not live within the sub-atomic level after all. However, it does spill out into our outer world. Most of the various electronic devices of the past decades rely on the quantum tunnelling effect in transistors and silicon chips. The revolution in quantum physics has begun to influence the life sciences, and biologists and botanists are beginning to come up against quantum events as the basis of living systems, in the structure of complex molecules in the living tissues and membranes of cells for example. When we look at the blue of the sky, we are looking at a phenomenon only recently understood through quantum theory.
Although the Quantum picture of reality might seem strange indeed, I believe the picture it presents of the foundations of the material world, the ever flowing sea of forces metamorphosing and interacting through the medium of "virtual" or quantum messenger particles, has certain parallels with nature of our consciousness.
I believe that if we try to examine the nature of our consciousness we will find at its basis it exhibits "quantum" like qualities. Seen from a distant, large scale and external perspective, we seem to be able to structure our consciousness in an exact and precise way, articulating thoughts and linking them together into long chains of arguments and intricate structures. Our consciousness can build complex images through its activity and seems to have all the qualities of predictability and solidity. The consciousness of a talented architect is capable of designing and holding within itself an image of large solid structures such as great cathedrals or public buildings. A mathematician is capable of inwardly picturing an abstract mathematical system, deriving its properties from a set of axioms.
In this sense our consciousness might appear as an ordered and deterministic structure, capable of behaving like and being explicable in the same terms as other large scale structures in the world. However, this is not so. For if we through introspection try to examine the way in which we are conscious, in a sense to look at the atoms of our consciousness, this regular structure disappears. Our consciousness does not actually work in such an ordered way. We only nurture an illusion if we try to hold to the view that our consciousness is fixed by an ordered deterministic structure. True, we can create the large scale designs of the architect, the abstract mathematical systems, a cello concerto, but anyone who has built such structures within their consciousness knows that this is not achieved by a linear deterministic route.
Our consciousness is at its root a maverick, ever moving, increasing by its accommodating perception, feeling, thought, to another. We can never hold it still or focus it at a point for long. Like the quantum nature of matter, the more we try to hold our consciousness to a fixed point, the greater the uncertainty in its energy will become. So when we focus and narrow our consciousness to a fixed centre, it is all the more likely to jump with a great rush of energy to some seemingly unrelated aspect of our inner life suddenly. We all have such experiences each moment of the day. As in our daily work we try to focus our mind upon some problem only to experience a shift to another domain in ourselves suddenly, another image or emotional current intrudes then vanishes again, like an ephemeral virtual particle in quantum theory.
Those who begin to work upon their consciousness through some kinds of meditative exercises will experience these quantum uncertainties in the field of consciousness in a strong way.
In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step toward a quantum view of consciousness, recognising that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world. The ancient Hermeticists foresaw consciousness as the "Inner Mercury.” Those who have experienced the paradoxical way in which the metal Mercury is both dense and metallic and yet so elusive, flowing and breaking up into small globules, and just as easily coming together again, will see how perceptive the alchemists were of the inner nature of consciousness, in choosing this analogy. Educators who treat the consciousness of children as if it were a filing cabinet to be filled with ordered arrays of knowledge are hopelessly wrong.
We can believe of the stepping stones whereby the formidable combinations await to the presence of the future, yet the nature of consciousness, and the look upon of what we see is justly to how this overlays links’ us with the mind/brain problem. The great difficulty in developing a theory of the way in which consciousness/mind is embodied in the activity of the brain, has I believe arisen out of the erroneous attempt to press a deterministic view onto our brain activity. Skinner and the behaviourist psychologists attempted to picture the activity of the brain as a computer where each cell behaved as an input/output device or a complex flip/flop. They saw nerve cells with their axons (output fibres) and dendrites (input fibres) being linked together into complex networks. An electrical impulse travelling onto a dendrite made a cell ‘fire’ and sent an impulse out along its axon so setting another nerve cell into action. The resulting patterns of nerve impulses constituted a reflex action, an impulse to move a muscle, a thought, a feeling, an intuitive experience. All could be reduced to the behaviour of this web of axons and dendrites of the nerve cells.
This simplistic picture, of course, was insufficient to explain even the behaviour of creatures like worms with primitive nervous systems, and in recent years this approach has largely been abandoned as it is becoming recognised that these events on the membranes of nerve cells are often triggered by shifts in the energy levels of sub-atomic particles such as electrons. In fact, at the root of such interactions lie quantum events, and the activity of the brain must now be seen as reflecting these quantum events.
The brain can no longer be seen as a vast piece of organic clockwork, but as a subtle device amplifying quantum events. If we trace a nerve impulse down to its root, there lies a quantum uncertainty, a sea of probability. So just how is it that this sea of probability can cast up such ordered structures and systems as the conception of a cello concerto or abstract mathematical entities? Perhaps here we may glimpse a way in which "spirit" can return into our physics.
The inner sea of quantum effects in our brain is in some way coupled to our ever flowing consciousness. When our consciousness focusses to a point, and we concentrate on some abstract problem or outer phenomenon, the physical events in our brain, the pattern of impulses, shifts in some ordered way. In a sense, the probability waves of a number of quantum systems in different parts of the brain, are brought into resonance, and our consciousness is able momentarily to create an ordered pattern that manifests physically through the brain. The thought, feeling, perception is momentarily earthed in physical reality, brought from the realm of the spiritual potential into outer actuality. This focussed ordering of the probability waves of many quantum systems requires an enormous amount of energy, but this can be borrowed in the quantum sense for a short instant of time. Thus we have through this quantum borrowing a virtual quantum state that is the physical embodiment of a thought, feeling, etc. However, as this can only be held for a short time, the quantum debt must be paid and the point of our consciousness is forced to jump to another quantum state, perhaps in another region of the brain. Thus our thoughts are jumbled up with emotions, perceptions, fantasy images.
The central point within our consciousness, our "spirit" in the hermetic sense, can now be seen as an entity that can work to control quantum probabilities. To our "spirits" our brain is a quantum sea providing a rich realm in which it can incarnate and manifest patterns down into the electrical/chemical impulses of the nervous system. (It has been calculated that the number of interconnections existing in our brains far exceeds the number of atoms in the whole universe - so in this sense the microcosm truly mirrors the macrocosm!). Our "spirit" allows the unswerving quantum, of which it borrows momentarily to press of a certain order into this sea that manifests the containment of a thought, emotion, etc. Such an ordered state can only exist momentarily, before our spirit or point of consciousness is forced to jump and move to other regions of the brain, where at that moment the pattern of probability waves for the particles in these nerve cells, can reflect the form that our spirit is trying with which to work.
This quantum borrowing to create regular patterns of probability waves is bought for a high price in that a degree of disorder must inevitably arise whenever the spirit tries to focus and reflect a linked sequential chain of patterns into the brain (such as we would experience as a logical adaption of our thought or some inward picture of some elaborate structure). Thus, it is not surprising that our consciousness sometimes brings to adrift and jumps about in a seemingly chaotic way. The quantum borrowing might also be behind our need for sleep and dream, allowing the physical brain to rid itself of the shadowy echos of these patterns pressed into it during waking consciousness. Dreaming may be that point in a cycle where consciousness and its vehicle interpenetrate and flow together, allowing the patterns and waves of probability to appear without any attempt to focus them to a point. In dream and sleep we experience our point of consciousness dissolving, decoupling and defocussing.
The central point of our consciousness, when actively thinking or feeling, must jump around the sea of patterns in our brain. (It is well known through neurophysiology that function cannot be located at a certain point in the brain, but that different areas and groups of nerve cells can take on a variety of different functions.) We all experience this when in meditation we merely let our consciousness move as it will. Then we come to sense the elusive mercurial eternal movement of the point of our consciousness within our inner space. You will find it to be a powerful and convincing experience if you try in meditation to follow the point of your consciousness moving within the space of your skull. Many religious traditions teach methods for experiencing this inner point of spirit.
I believe the movement of this point of consciousness, which appears as a pattern of probability waves in the quantum sea, must occur in extremely short segments of time, of necessity shorter than the time an electron takes to move from one state to another within the molecular structure of the nerve cell membranes. We are thus dealing in time scales significantly less than 10 to the power -16 of a second and possibly down to 10 to the power -43 of a second. During such short periods of time, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that lies at the basis of quantum theory, means that this central spark of consciousness can borrow a large amount of energy, which explains how it can bring a large degree of ordering into a pattern. Although our point of consciousness lives at this enormously fast speed, our brain, which transforms this into a pattern of electro/chemical activity runs at a much slower rate. Between creating each pattern our spark of consciousness must wait almost an eternity for this to be manifested on the physical level. Perhaps this may account for the sense we all have sometimes of taking an enormous leap in consciousness, or travelling though vast realms of ideas, or flashes of images, in what is only a fleeting moment.
At around 10 to the power -43 of a second, time itself becomes quantized, that is it appears as discontinuous particles of time, for there is no way in which time can manifest in quantities less than 10 to the power -43 (the so-called Planck time). For here the borrowed quantum energies distort the fabric of space turning it back upon themselves. Their time must have a stop. At such short intervals the energies available are enormous enough to create virtual black holes and wormhole in space-time, and at this level we have only a sea of quantum probabilities - the so-called Quantum Foam. Contemporary physics suggests that through these virtual wormhole in space-time there are links with all time past and future, and through the virtual black holes even with parallel universes.
It must be somewhat above this level that our consciousness works, weaving probability waves into patterns and incarnating them in the receptive structure of our brains. Our being or spirit lives in this Quantum Foam, which is thus the Eternal Now, infinite in extent and a plenum of all possibilities. The patterns of everything that has been, that is now, and will come to be, exists latently in this quantum foam. Perhaps this is the realm though which the mystics stepped into timelessness, the eternal present, and sensed the omnipotence and omniscience of the spirit.
I believe that these exciting discoveries of modern physics could be the basis for a new view of consciousness and the way it is coupled to our physical nature in the brain. (Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of Quantum theory which puzzles’ and mystifies contemporary physicists is the way in which their quantum description of matter requires that they recognise the consciousness of the observer as a factor in certain experiments. This enigma has caused not a few physicists to take an interest in spirituality especially inclining them to eastern traditions like Taoism or Buddhism, and in time I hope that perhaps even the hermetic traditions might prove worthy of their interest).
An important experiment carried out as recently as summer 1982 by the French physicist, Aspect, has unequivocally demonstrated the fact that physicists cannot get round the Uncertainty Principle and simultaneously determine the quantum states of particles, and confirmed that physicists cannot divorce the consciousness of the observer from the events observed. This experiment (in disproving the separability of quantum measurements) has confirmed what Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg were only able to debate over philosophically - that with quantum theory we have to leave behind our naive picture of reality under which there happens as some unvaryingly compound structure if only to support its pictured clockwork. We are challenged by quantum theory to build new ways in which to picture reality, a physics, moreover, in which consciousness plays a central role, in which the observer is inextricably interwoven in the fabric of reality.
In a sense it may now be possible to build a new model of quantum consciousness, compatible with contemporary physics and which allows a space for the inclusion of the hermetic idea of the spirit. It may be that science has taken a long roundabout route through the reductionist determinism of the 19th century and returned to a more hermetic conception of our inner world.
In this short essay, incompletely argued though it may be, I hope I have at least presented some of the challenging ideas that lie behind the seeming negativity of our present age. For behind the hopelessness and despair of our times we stand on the brink of a great breakthrough to a new recognition of the vast spiritual depths that live within us all as human beings.
The idea that people may create devices that are conscious is known as artificial consciousness (AC). This is an ancient idea, perhaps dating back to the ancient Greek Promethean myth in which conscious people were supposedly manufactured from clay, pottery being an advanced technology in those days. In modern science fiction artificial people or conscious beings are described for being manufactured from electronic components. The idea of artificial consciousness (which is also known as machine consciousness (MC) or synthetic consciousness) is an interesting philosophical problem in the twenty first century because, with increased understanding of genetics, neuroscience and information processing it may soon be possible to create an entity that is conscious. It may be possible biologically to create a being by manufacturing a genome that had the genes necessary for a human brain, and to inject this into a suitable host germ cell. Such a creature, when implanted and born from a suitable womb, would very possibly be conscious and artificial. But what properties of this organism would be responsible for its consciousness? Could such a being be made from non-biological components? Can, technological technique be used in the design of computers and be to adapt and create a conscious entity? Would it ever be ethical to do such a thing? Neuroscience hypothesizes that consciousness is the synergy generated with the inter-operation of various parts of our brain, what have come to be called the neuronal correlates of consciousness, or NCC. The brain seems to do this while avoiding the problem described in the Homunculus fallacy and overcoming the problems described below in the section on the nature of consciousness. A quest for proponents of artificial consciousness is therefore to manufacture a machine to emulate this inter-operation, which no one yet claims fully to understand.
Consciousness is described at length in the consciousness article in Wikipedia. Wherefore, some informal type of naivete has to the structural foundation of realism and the direct of realism are that we perceive things in the world directly and our brains perform processing. On the other hand, according to indirect realism and dualism our brains contain data about the world that is obtained by processing but what we perceive is some sort of mental model or state that appears to overlay physical things as a result of projective geometry (such as the point observation in Rene Descartes dualism). Which of these general approaches to consciousness is correct has not been resolved and is the subject of fierce debate. The theory of direct perception is problematical because it would seem to require some new physical theory that allows conscious experience to supervene directly on the world outside the brain. On the other hand, if we perceive things indirectly, via a model of the world in our brains, then some new physical phenomenon, other than the endless further flow of data, would be needed to explain how the model becomes experience. If we perceive things directly self-awareness is difficult to explain because one of the principal reasons for proposing direct perception is to avoid Ryle's regress where internal processing becomes an infinite loop or recursion. The belief in direct perception also demands that we cannot 'really' be aware of dreams, imagination, mental images or any inner life because these would involve recursion. Self awareness is less problematic for entities that perceive indirectly because, by definition, they are perceiving their own state. However, as mentioned above, proponents of indirect perception must suggest some phenomenon, either physical or dialyzed to prevent Ryle's regress. If we perceive things indirectly then self awareness might result from the extension of experience in time described by Immanuel Kant, William James and Descartes. Unfortunately this extension in time may not be consistent with our current understanding of physics.
Information processing consists of encoding a state, such as the geometry of an image, on a carrier such as a stream of electrons, and then submitting this encoded state to a series of transformations specified by a set of instructions called a program. In principle the carrier could be anything, even steel balls or onions, and the machine that implement the instructions need not be electronic, it could be mechanical or fluids. Digital computers implement information processing. From the earliest days of digital computers people have suggested that these devices may one day be conscious. One of the earliest workers to consider this idea seriously was Alan Turing. The Wikipedia article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) considers this problem in depth. If technologists were limited to the use of the principles of digital computing when creating a conscious entity, they would have the problems associated with the philosophy of strong AI. The most serious problem is John Searle's Chinese room argument in which it is demonstrated that the contents of an information processor have no intrinsic meaning - at any moment they are just a set of electrons or steel balls etc. Searle's objection does not convince those who believe in direct perception because they would maintain that 'meaning' is only to be found in the objects of perception, which they believe is the world itself. The objection is also countered by the concept of emergence in which it is proposed that some unspecified new physical phenomenon arise in very complex processors as a result of their complexity. It is interesting that the misnomer digital sentience is sometimes used in the context of artificial intelligence research. Sentience means the ability to feel or perceive in the absence of thoughts, especially inner speech. It draws attention to the way that conscious experience is a state rather than a process that might occur in processors.
The debate about whether a machine could be conscious under any circumstances is usually described as the conflict between physicalism and dualism. Dualities believe that there is something nonphysical about consciousness while physicalist hold that all things are physical. Those who believe that consciousness is physical are not limited to those who hold that consciousness is a property of encoded information on carrier signals. Several indirect realist philosophers and scientists have proposed that, although information processing might deliver the content of consciousness, the state that is consciousness be due to another physical phenomenon. The eminent neurologist Wilder Penfield was of this opinion and scientists such as Arthur Stanley Eddington, Roger Penrose, Herman Weyl, Karl Pribram and Henry Stapp among many others, have also proposed that consciousness involve physical phenomena that are more subtle than simple information processing. Even some of the most ardent supporters of consciousness in information processors such as Dennett suggests that some new, emergent, scientific theory may be required to account for consciousness. As was mentioned above, neither the ideas that involve direct perception nor those that involve models of the world in the brain seem to be compatible with current physical theory. It seems that new physical theory may be required and the possibility of dualism is not, as yet, ruled out.
Some technologists working in the field of artificial consciousness are trying to create devices that appear conscious. These devices might simulate consciousness or actually be conscious but provided are those that appear conscious in the desired result that has been achieved. In computer science, the term digital sentience is used to describe the concept of digital numeration could someday be capable of independent thought. Digital sentience, if it ever comes to exist, is likely to be a form of artificial intelligence. A generally accepted criterion for sentience is self-awareness and this is also one of the definitions of consciousness. To support the concept of self-awareness, a definition of conscious can be cited: "having an awareness of one's environment and one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts.” In more general terms, an AC system should be theoretically capable of achieving various or by a more strict view all verifiable, known, objective, and observable aspects of consciousness so that the device appears conscious. Another, but less to agree about, that its responsible and corresponding definition as extracted in the word of “conscious,” slowly emerges as to be inferred through the avenue in being of, "Possessing knowledge by the seismical provisions that allow whether are by means through which ane existently internal and/or externally is given to its observable property, whereas of becoming labelled for reasons that posit in themselves to any assemblage that has forwarded by ways of the conscious experience. Although, the observably existing provinces are those that are by their own nature the given properties from each that occasion to natural properties of a properly ordered approving for which knowledgeable entities must somehow endure to exist in the awarenesses of sensibility.
There are various aspects and/or abilities that are generally considered necessary for an AC system, or an AC system should be able to learn them; These are very useful as criteria to determine whether a certain machine is artificially conscious. These are only the most cited, however, there are many others that are not covered. The ability to predict (or anticipate) foreseeable events is considered a highly desirable attribute of AC by Igor Aleksander: He writes in Artificial Neuro-consciousness: An Update: "Prediction is one of the key functions of consciousness. An organism that cannot predict would have itself its own serious hamper of consciousness." The emergent’s multiple draft’s principle proposed by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained may be useful for prediction: It involves the evaluation and selection of the most appropriate "draft" to fit the current environment. Consciousness is sometimes defined as self-awareness. While self-awareness is very important, it may be subjective and is generally difficult to test. Another test of AC, in the opinion of some, should include a demonstration that machines can learn the ability to filter out certain stimuli in its environment, to focus on certain stimuli, and to show attention toward its environment in general. The mechanisms that govern how human attention is driven are not yet fully understood by scientists. This absence of knowledge could be exploited by engineers of AC; Since we don't understand attentiveness in humans, we do not have specific and known criteria to measure it in machines. Since unconsciousness in humans equates to total inattentiveness, the AC should have outputs that indicate where its attention is focussed at anyone time, at least during the aforementioned test. By Antonio Chella from University of Palermo "The mapping between the conceptual and the linguistic areas gives the interpretation of linguistic symbols in terms of conceptual structures. It is achieved through a focus of attentive mechanistic implementation, by means of suitable recurrent neural networks with internal states. A sequential attentive mechanism is hypothesized that suitably scans the conceptual representation and, according to the hypotheses generated on the basis of previous knowledge, it predicts and detects the interesting events occurring in the scene. Hence, starting from the incoming information, such a mechanism generates expectations and it makes contexts in which hypotheses may be verified and, if necessary, adjusted. "Awareness could be another required aspect. However, again, there are some problems with the exact definition of awareness. To illustrate this point is the philosopher David Chalmers (1996) controversially puts forward the panpsychist argument that a thermostat could be considered conscious: it has states corresponding too hot, too cold, or at the correct temperature. The results of the experiments of neuro-scanning on monkeys suggest that a process, not a state or object activate neurons. For such reaction there must be created a model of the process based on the information received through the senses, creating models in such that its way demands a lot of flexibility, and is also useful for making predictions. Personality is another characteristic that is generally considered vital for a machine to appear conscious. In the area of behavioural psychology, there is a somewhat popular theory that personality is an illusion created by the brain in order to interact with other people. It is argued that without other people to interact with, humans (and possibly other animals) would have no need of personalities, and human personality would never have evolved. An artificially conscious machine may need to have a personality capable of expression such that human observers can interact with it in a meaningful way. However, this is often questioned by computer scientists; The Turing test, which measures by a machine's personality, is not considered generally useful anymore. Learning is also considered necessary for AC. By engineering consciousness, a summary by Ron Chrisley, studying at the University of Sussex, says that of consciousness is and involves self, transparency, learning (of dynamics), planning, heterophenomenology, split of attentional signal, action selection, attention and timing management. Daniel Dennett said in his article "Consciousness in Human and Robotic Minds" are said that, "It might be vastly easier to make an initial unconscious or nonconscious "infant, as a, robot and let it "grow up" into consciousness, is more or less the way we all do. Chrisley explained that the robot Cog, is easily described, "Will did not bring about the adult at first, in spite of its adult size. But it is being designed to pass through an extended period of artificial infancy, during which it will have to learn from experience, experience it will gain in the rough-and-tumble environment of the real world, and in addition, ‘nobody doubts that any agent capable of interacting intelligently with a human being on human terms must have access too literally millions if not billions of logically independent items of world knowledge. In that of either of these must be hand-coded individually by human programmers-a tactic being pursued, notoriously, by Douglas Lenat and his CYC team in Dallas-or some way must be found for the artificial agent to learn its world knowledge from (real) interactions with the (real) world. An interesting article about learning is Implicit learning and consciousness by Axel Cleeremans, University of Brussels and Luis Jiménez, University of Santiago, where learning is defined as “a set of phylogenetically advanced adaptation processes that critically depend on an evolved sensitivity to subjective experience so as to enable agents to afford flexible control over their actions in complex, unpredictable environments. Anticipation is the final characteristic that could possibly be used to make a machine appear conscious. An artificially conscious machine should be able to anticipate events correctly in order to be ready to respond to them when they occur. The implication here is that the machine needs real-time components, making it possible to demonstrate that it possesses artificial consciousness in the present and not just in the past. In order to do this, the machine being tested must operate coherently in an unpredictable environment, to simulate the real world.
Newborn babies have been trying for centuries to convince us they are, like the rest of us, sensing, feeling, thinking human beings. Struggling by implies of its position, but now seems as contrary to thousands of years of ignorant supposition that newborns are partly human, sub-human, or not-yet human, the vast majority of babies arrive in hospitals today, greeted by medical specialists who are still sceptical as to whether they can actually see, feel pain, learn, and remember what happens to them. Physicians, immersed in protocol, employ painful procedures, confident no permanent impression, certainly no lasting damage, will result from the manner in which babies are received into this world.
The way "standard medicine" sees infants-by no means universally shared by women or by the midwives who used to assist them at birth-has taken on increasing importance in a country where more than 95% are hospitals born and a quarter of these surgically delivered. While this radical change was occurring, the psychological aspects of birth were little considered. In fact, for most of the century, medical beliefs about the infants nervous system prevailed in psychology as well. However, in the last three decades, research psychology has invested heavily in infant studies and uncovered many previously hidden talents of both the fetus and the newborn baby. The findings are surprising: Babies are more sensitive, more emotional, and more cognitive than we used to believe. They are not what we thought. Babies are so different that we must create new paradigms to describe accurately who they are and what they can do.
Not long ago, experts in pediatrics and psychology were teaching that babies were virtually blind, had no sense of colour, could not recognize their mothers, and heard in "echoes.” They believed babies cared little about sharp changes in temperature at birth and had only a crude sense of smell and taste. Their pain was "not like our pain" yet, their cries not meaningful, their smiles were "gas," and their emotion’s undeveloped. Worst of all, most professionals believed babies were not equipped with enough brain matter to permit them to remember, learn, or find meaning in their experiences.
These false and unflattering views are still widely spread between both professionals and the public. No wonder people find it hard to believe that a traumatic birth, whether it is by cesarean section or vaginal, has significant, on-going effects.
Unfortunately, today these unfounded prejudices still have the weight of "science" behind them, but the harmful results to babies are hardly better than the rank superstitions of the past. The resistance of "experts" who continue to see infants in terms of their traditional incapacities may be the last great obstacle for babies to leap over before being embraced for whom they really are. Old ideas are bound to die under the sheer weight of new evidence, but not before millions of babies suffer unnecessarily because their parents and their doctors do not know they are fully human.
As the light of research reaches into the dark corners of prejudice, we may thank those in the emerging field of prenatal/perinatal psychology. Since this field is often an enter professional collaboration and does not fit conveniently to accepted academic departments, the field is not yet recognized in the academic world by endowed chairs or even by formal courses. At present only a few courses exist throughout the world. Yet research teams have achieved a succession of breakthroughs that challenge standard "scientific" ideas of human development.
Scholars in this field respect the full range of evidence of infant capabilities, whether from personal reports contributed by parents, revelations arising from therapeutic work, or from formal experiments. Putting together all the bits and pieces of information gathered from around the globe yields a fundamentally different picture of a baby.
The main way information about sentient, conscious babies has reached the public, especially pregnant parents, has been via popular media: books, movies, magazine features, and television. Among the most outstanding have been The Secret Life of the Unborn Child by Canadian psychiatrist Thomas Verny (now in 25 languages), movies like Look Who's Talking, and several talk shows, including Oprah Winfrey, where a program on therapeutic treatment of womb and birth traumas probably reached 25 million viewers in 25 countries. Two scholarly journals are devoted entirely to prenatal/perinatal psychology, one in North America that began in 1986, and one in Europe beginning in 1989. The Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) is a gathering place for people interested in this field and who keep informed through newsletters, journals, and conferences.
Evidence that babies are sensitive, cognitive, and are affected by their birth experiences may come from various sources. The oldest evidence is anecdotal and intuitive. Mothers are the principal contributors to the idea of baby as a person, one you can talk to, and one who can talk back as well. This process, potentially available to any mother, is better explained in psychic terms than in word-based language. This exchange of thoughts is probably telepathic rather than linguistic.
Mothers who communicate with their infants know that the baby is a person, mind and soul, with understanding, wisdom, and purpose. This phenomenon is cross-cultural, probably universal, although all mothers do not necessarily engage in this dialogue. In an age of "science," a mother's intuitive knowledge is too often dismissed. What mothers know has not been considered as valid data. What mothers say about their infants must be venal, self-serving, or imaginary, and can never be equal to what is known by "experts" or "scientists."
This prejudice extends into a second category of information about babies, and the evidence derived from clinical work. Although the work of psychotherapy is usually done by formally educated, scientifically trained, licensed persons who are considered expert in their field, the information they listen to is anecdotal and their methods are the blending of science and art.
Their testimony of infant intelligence, based on the recollections of clients, is often compelling. Therapists are privy to clients' surprising revelations, many of which show a direct connection between traumas surrounding birth and later disabilities of heart and mind. Although it is possible for these connections to be purely imaginary, we know they are not when hospital records and eyewitness reports confirm the validity of the memories. Obstetrician David Cheek, using hypnosis with a series of subjects, discovered that they could accurately report the full set of left and right turns and sequences involved in their own deliveries. This is technical information that no ordinary person would have unless his memories are accurate.
Psychologists using hypnosis, have found it necessary to test the reliability of memories people gave me about their traumas during the birth process, memories that had not previously been conscious. I hypnotized mother and child pairs who said they had never spoken in any detail about that child's birth. I received a detailed report of what happened from the now-adult child that I compared with the mother's report, given also in hypnosis.
The reports dovetailed at many points and were clearly reports of the same birth. By comparing one story with the other, I could see when the adult child was fantasizing, rather than having accurate recall, but fantasy was rare. It is to conclude that these birth memories were real memories, and were a reliable guide to what had happened.
Some of the first indications that babies are sentient came from the practice of psychoanalysis, stretching back to the beginning of the century to the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud. Although Freud himself was sceptical about the operation of the infant mind, his clients kept bringing him information that seemed to link their anxieties and fears to events surrounding their births. He theorized that birth might be the original trauma upon which later anxiety was constructed.
Otto Rank, Freud's associate, was more certain that birth traumas underlay many later neuroses, so he reorganized psychoanalysis around the assumption of birth trauma. He was rewarded by the rapid recovery of his clients who were "cured" in far less time than was required for a customary psychoanalysis. In the second half of the century, important advances have been made in resolving early trauma and memories of trauma.
Hypnotherapy, primal therapy, psychedelic therapies, various combinations of body work with breathing and sound stimulation, sand tray therapy, and art effects have all proved useful in accessing important imprints, decisions, and memories stored by the infant mind. If there had been no working mind in infancy, of course there would be no need to return to it to heal bad impressions, change decisions, and otherwise resolve mental and emotional problems.
A third burgeoning source of information about the conscious nature of babies comes from scientific experiments and systematic observations utilizing breakthrough technologies. In our culture, with its preference for refined measurement and strict protocols, these are the studies that get funding. And the results are surprising from this contemporary line of empirical research.
We have learned so much about babies in the last twenty years that most of what we thought we knew before is suspect, and much of it is obsolete. I will highlight the new knowledge in three sections: development of the physical senses, beginnings of self-expression, and evidence of active mental life.
First, we have a much better idea of our physical development, the process of the embodiment from conception to birth. Our focus here is on the senses and when they become available during gestation. Touch is our first sense and perhaps our last. Sensitivity to touch begins in our faces about seven weeks gestational age. Tactile sensitivity expands steadily to include most parts of the fetal body by 17 weeks. In the normal womb, touch is never rough, and temperature is relatively constant. At birth, this placid environment ends with dramatic new experiences of touch that no baby can overlook.
By only 14 weeks gestational age, the taste buds are formed, and ultrasound shows both sucking and swallowing. A fetus controls the frequency of swallowing amniotic fluid, and will speed up or slow in reaction to sweet and bitter tastes. Studies show babies have a definite preference for sweet tastes. Hearing begins earlier than anyone thought possible at 16 weeks. The ear is not complete until about 24 weeks, a fact revealing the complex nature of listening, which includes reception of vibes through our skin, skeleton, and vestibular system as well as the ear. Babies in the womb are listening to maternal sounds and to the immediate environment for almost six months. By birth, their hearing is about as good as ours.
Our sense of sight also develops before birth, although our eyelids remain fused from week 10 through 26. Nevertheless, babies in the womb will react to light flashed on the mother's abdomen. By the time of birth, vision is well-advanced, though not yet perfect. Babies have no trouble focussing at the intimate 16-inch distance where the faces of mothers and fathers are usually found.
Mechanisms for pain perception like those for touch, develop early. By about three month, if babies are accidentally struck by a needle inserted into the womb to withdraw fluid during amniocentesis, they quickly twist away and try to escape from the needle. Intrauterine surgery, a new aspect of fetal medicine made possibly in part by our new ability to see inside the womb, means new opportunities for fetal pain.
Although surgeons have long denied prenates experience pain, a recent experiment in London proved unborn babies feel pain. Babies who were needled for intrauterine transfusions showed a 600% increase in beta-endorphins, hormones generated to deal with stress. In just ten minutes of needling, even 23 week old fetuses were mounting a full-scale stress response. Needling at the intrahapatic vein provokes vigorous body and breathing movements.
Finally, our muscle systems develop under buoyant conditions in the fluid environment of the womb and are regularly used in navigating the area. However, after birth, in the dry world of normal gravity, our muscle systems look feeble. As everyone knows, babies cannot walk, and they struggle, usually in vain, to hold up their own heads. Because the muscles are still relatively undeveloped, babies give a misleading appearance of incompetence. In truth, babies have remarkably useful sensory equipment very much like our own.
A second category of evidence for baby consciousness comes from empirical research on bodily movement in utero. Except for the movement a mother and father could sometimes feel, we have had almost no knowledge of the extent and variety of movement inside the womb. This changed with the advent of real-time ultrasound imaging, giving us moment by moment pictures of fetal activity.
One of the surprises is that movement commences between eight and ten weeks gestational age. This has been determined with the aid of the latest round of ultrasound improvements. Fetal movement is voluntary, spontaneous, and graceful, not jerky and reflexive as previously reported. By ten weeks, babies move their hands to their heads, face, and mouth; they flex and extend their arms and legs; They open and close their mouths and rotate longitudinally. From 10 to 12 weeks onward, the repertoire of body language is largely complete and continues throughout gestation. Periodic exercise alternates with rest periods on a voluntary basis reflecting individual needs and interests. Movement is self-expression and expressional personalities.
Twins viewed periodically via ultrasound during gestation often show highly independent motor profiles, and, over time continue to distinguish themselves through movement both inside and outside the womb. They are expressing their individuality.
Close observation has brought many unexpected behaviours to light. By 16 weeks, male babies are having their first erections. As soon as they have hands, they are busy exploring everywhere and everything, feet, toes, mouth, and the umbilical cord: these are their first toys.
By 30 weeks, babies have an intense dream life, spending more time in the dream state of sleep than they ever do after they are born. This is significant because dreaming is definitely a cognitive activity, a creative exercise of the mind, and because it is a spontaneous and personal activity.
Observations of the fetus also reveal a number of reactions to conditions in the womb. Such are the reactions to provocative circumstances is a further sign of selfhood. Consciousness of danger and manoeuver of the self-defence are visible in fetal reactions to amniocentesis. Even when things go normally and babies are not struck by needles, they react with wild variations of normal heart activity, alter their breathing movements, may "hide" from the needle, and often remain motionless for a time - suggesting fear and shock.
Babies react with alarm to loud noises, car accidents, earthquakes, and even to their mother's watching terrifying scenes on television. They swallow less when they do not like the taste of amniotic fluid, and they stop their usual breathing movements when their mothers drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.
In a documented report of work via ultrasound, a baby struck accidentally by a needle not only twisted away, but located the needle barrel and collide repeatedly-surely an aggressive and angry behaviours. Similarly, ultrasound experts have reported seeing twins hitting each other, while others have seen twins playing together, gently awakening one-another, rendering cheek-to-cheek, and even kissing. Such scenes, some at only 20 weeks, were never anticipated in developmental psychology. No one anticipated sociable behaviour nor emotional behaviour until months after a baby's birth.
We can see emotion expressed in crying and smiling long before 40 weeks, the usual time of birth. We see first smiles on the faces of premature infants who are dreaming. Smiles and pleasant looks, along with a variety of unhappy facial expressions, tell us dreams have pleasant or unpleasant contents to which babies are reacting. Mental activity is causing emotional activity. Audible crying has been reported by 23 weeks, in cases of abortion, revealing that babies are experiencing very appropriate emotion by that time. Close to the time of birth, medical personnel have documented crying from within the womb, in association with obstetrical procedures that have allowed air to enter the space around the fetal larynx.
Finally, a third source of evidence for infant consciousness is the research that confirms various forms of learning and memory both in the fetus and the newborn. Since infant consciousness was considered impossible until recently, experts have had to accept a growing body of experimental findings illustrating that babies learn from their experiences. In studies that began in Europe in 1925 and America in 1938, babies have demonstrated all the types of learning formally recognized in psychology at the time: classical conditioning, habituation, and reinforcement conditioning, both inside and outside the womb.
In modern times, as learning has been understood more broadly, experiments have shown a range of learning abilities. Immediately after birth, babies show recognition of musical passages, which they have heard repeatedly before birth, whether it is the bassoon passage in Peter and the Wolf, "Mary Had a Little Lamb," or the theme music of a popular soap opera.
Language acquisition begins in the womb as babies listen repeatedly to their mothers' intonations and learn their mother tongue. As early as 25 weeks, the recording of a baby's first cry contains so many rhythms, intonations, and other features common to their mother's speech that their spectrographs can be matched. In experiments shortly after birth, babies recognize their mother's voice and prefer her voice to other female voices. In the delivery room, babies recognize their father's voice and recognize specific sentences their fathers have spoken, especially if the babies have heard these sentences frequently while they were in the womb. After birth, babies show special regard for their native language, preferring it to a foreign language.
Fetal learning and memory also consist of stories that are read aloud to them repeatedly before birth. At birth, babies will alter their sucking behaviour to obtain recordings of the familiar stories. In a recent experiment, a French and American team had mothers repeat a particular children's rhyme each day from week 33 to week 37. After four weeks of exposure, babies reacted to the target rhymes and not to other rhymes, proving they recognize specific language patterns while they are in the womb.
Newborn babies quickly learn to distinguish their mother's face from other female faces, their mother's breast pads from other breast pads, their mother's distinctive underarm odour, and their mother's perfume if she has worn the same perfume consistently.
Premature babies learn from their unfortunate experiences in neonatal intensive care units. One boy, who endured surgery parlayed with curare, but was given no pain-killing anaesthetics, of developed and pervading fear of doctors and hospitals that remains undiminished in his teens. He also learned to fear the sound and sight of adhesive bandages. This was in reaction to having some of his skin pulled off with adhesive tape during his stay in the premature nursery.
Confirmation that early experiences of pain have serious consequences later has come from recent studies of babies at the time of first vaccinations. Researchers who studied infants being vaccinated four to six months after birth discovered that babies who had experienced the pain of circumcision had higher pain scores and cried longer. The painful ordeal of circumcision had apparently conditioned them to pain and set their pain threshold lower. This is an example of learning from experience: Perinatal pain.
Happily, there are other things to learn besides pain and torture. The Prenatal Classroom is a popular program of prenatal stimulation for parents who want to establish strong bonds of communication with a baby in the womb. One of the many exercises is the "Kick Game," which you play by responding to the child's kick by touching the spot your baby just kicked, and saying "kick, baby kick." Babies quickly learn to respond to this kind of attention: They do kick again and they learn to kick anywhere their parents touch. One father taught his baby to kick in a complete circle.
Babies also remember consciously the big event of birth itself, at least during the first years of their lives. Proof of this comes from little children just learning to talk. Usually around two or three years of age, when children are first able to speak about their experiences, some spontaneously recall what their birth was like. They tell what happened in plain language, sometimes accompanied by pantomime, pointing and sound effects. They describe water, black and red colours, the coming light, or dazzling light, and the squeezing sensations. Cesarean babies tell about a door or window suddenly opening, or a zipper that zipped open and let them out. Some babies remember fear and danger. They also remember and can reveal secrets.
One of my favourite stories of a secret birth memory came from Cathy, a midwife's assistant. With the birth completed, she found herself alone with a hungry, restless baby after her mother had gone to bathe and the chief midwife was busy in another room. Instinctively, Cathy offered the baby her own breast for a short time: then she wondered if this were appropriate and stopped feeding the infant without telling anyone what had happened. Years later, when the little young woman was almost four, Cathy was babysitting her. In a quiet moment, she asked the child if she remembered her birth. The child did, and volunteered various accurate details. Then, moving closer to whisper a secret, she said "You held me and gave me titty when I cried, and Mommy wasn't there." Cathy said to herself, "Nobody can tell me babies don't remember their births"
Is a baby a conscious and real person? To me it is no longer appropriate to speculate. It is too late to speculate when so much is known. The range of evidence now available in the form of knowledge of the fetal sensory system, observations of fetal behaviour in the womb, and experimental proof of learning and memory - all of this evidence-amply verifies what some mothers and fathers have sensed from time immemorial, that a baby is a real person. The baby is real in having a sense of self that can be seen in creative efforts to adjust or to influence its environment. Babies show self-regulation (as in restricting swallowing and breathing), the self-defence (as in retreating from invasive needles and strong light), self-assertion, combat with a needle, or striking out at a bothersome twin.
Babies are like us in having clearly manifested feelings in their reactions to assaults, injuries, irritations, or medically inflicted pain. They smile, cry, and kick in protest, manifest fear, anger, grief, pleasure, or displeasure in ways that seem entirely appropriate in relation to their circumstances. Babies are cognitive beings, thinking their own thoughts, dreaming their own dreams, learning from their own experiences, and remembering their own experiences.
An iceberg can serve as a useful metaphor to understand the unconscious mind, its relationship to the conscious mind and how the two parts of our mind can better work together. As an iceberg floats in the water, the huge mass of it remains below the surface.
Only a small percentage of the whole iceberg is visible above the surface. In this way, the iceberg is like the mind. The conscious mind is what we notice above the surface while the unconscious mind, the largest and most powerful part, remains unseen below the surface.
In our metaphor that regards of the small amount of icebergs, far and above the surface represents the conscious mind; The huge mass below the surface, the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind holds all awareness that is not presently in the conscious mind. All memories, feelings and thoughts that are out of conscious awareness are by definition "unconscious." It is also called the subconscious and is known as the dreaming mind or deep mind.
Knowledgeable and powerful in a different way than the conscious mind, the unconscious mind handles the responsibility of keeping the body running well. It has memory of every event we've ever experienced; it is the source and storehouse of our emotions; and it is often considered our connection with Spirit and with each other.
No model of how the mind works disputes, the tremendous power, which is in constant action below the tip of the iceberg. The conscious mind is constantly supported by unconscious resources. Just think of all the things you know how to do without conscious awareness. If you drive, you use more than 30 specific skills . . . without being aware of them. These are skills, not facts; they are processes, requiring intelligence, decision-making and training.
Besides these learned resources that operate below the surface of consciousness there are important natural resources. For instance, the unconscious mind regulates all the systems of the body and keeps them in harmony with each other. It controls heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, the endocrine system and the nervous system, just to name a few of its natural, automatic duties.
The conscious mind, like the part of the iceberg above the surface, is a small portion of the whole being. The conscious mind is what we ordinarily think of when we say "my mind." It's associated with thinking, analysing and making judgments and decisions. The conscious mind is actively sorting and filtering its perceptions because only so much information can reside in consciousness at once. Everything else falls back below the water line, into unconsciousness.
Only seven bits of information, and/or minus two can be held consciously at one time. Everything else we are thinking, feeling or perceiving now . . . along with all our memories remains unconscious, until called into consciousness or until rising spontaneously.
The imagination is the medium of communication between the two parts of the mind. In the iceberg metaphor, the imagination is at the surface of the water. It functions as a medium through which content from the unconscious mind can come into conscious awareness.
Communication through the imagination is two-way. The conscious mind can also use the medium of the imagination to communicate with the unconscious mind. The conscious mind sends suggestions about what it wants through the imagination to the unconscious. It imagines things, and the subconscious intelligencer work to make them happen.
The suggestions can be words, feelings or images. Athletes commonly use images mentally to rehearse how they want to perform by picturing themselves successfully completing their competition. A tennis player may see a tennis ball striking the racket at just the right spot, at just the perfect moment in the swing. Studies show that this form of imaging improves performance.
However, the unconscious mind uses the imagination to communicate with the conscious mind far more often than the other way around. New ideas, hunches, daydreams and intuitions come from the unconscious to the conscious mind through the medium of the imagination.
An undeniable example of the power in the lower part of the iceberg is dreaming. Dream images, visions, sounds and feelings come from the unconscious. Those who are aware of their dreams know how rich and real they can be. Even filtered, as they are when remembered later by the conscious mind, dreams can be quite powerful experiences.
Many people have received workable new ideas and insights, relaxing daydreams, accurate hunches, and unexpected intuitive understandings by replaying their dreams in a waking state. These are everyday examples of what happens when unconscious intelligencer and processes communicate through the imagination with the conscious mind.
Unfortunately, the culture has discouraged us from giving this information credibility. "It's just, but your imagination" is a commonly heard dismissal of information coming from the deep mind. This kind of conditioning has served to keep us disconnected from the deep richness of our vast unconscious resources.
In the self-healing work we'll be using the faculty of the imagination in several ways. In regression processes to access previously unconscious material from childhood, perinatal experiences and past lives, and even deeper realms of the "universal unconscious." Inner dialogue is another essential tool that makes use of the imagination in process work.
To shoulder atop the iceberg metaphor forward, each of us can be represented an iceberg, with the larger part of ourselves remain deeply submerged. And there's a place in the depths where all of our icebergs come together, a place in the unconscious where we connect with each other
The psychologist Carl Jung has named this realm the "Collective Unconscious." This is the area of mind where all humanity shares experience, and from where we draw on the archetypal energies and symbols that are common to us all. "Past life" memories are drawn from this level of the unconscious.
Another, even deeper level can be termed the "Universal Unconscious" where experiences beyond just humanity's can also be accessed with regression process. It is at this level that many "core issues" begin, and where their healing needs to be accomplished.
The unconscious connection "under the iceberg" between people is often more potent than the conscious level connection, and important consideration in doing the healing work. Relationship is an area rich with triggers to deeply buried material needing healing. And some parts of us cannot be triggered in any way other than "under the iceberg."
Although the conscious mind, steeped in cognition and thought, is able to deceive another . . . the unconscious mind, based in feeling, will often give us information from under the iceberg that contradicts what is being communicated consciously.
"Sounds right but feels wrong," is an example of information from under the iceberg surfacing in the conscious mind, but conflicting with what the conscious mind was ably to attain of its own. This kind of awareness is also called "intuition."
Intuitive information comes without a searching of the conscious memory or a formulation to be filled by imagination. When we access the intuition, we seem to arrive at an insight by a path from unknown sources directly to the conscious awareness. Wham! Out of nowhere, in no time.
No matter what the precise neurological process, the ability to access and use information from the intuition is extremely valuable in the effective and creative use of the tools of self healing. In relating with others, it's important to realize that your intuition will bring you information about the other and your relationship from under the iceberg.
When your intuition is the source of your words and actions, they are usually much more appropriate and helpful than what thinking or other functions of the conscious mind could muster. What you do and say from the intuition in earnest communication will be meaningful to the other, even though it may not make sense to you.
The most skilful and comprehending way to nurture and develop your intuition is to trust all of your intuitive insights. Trust encourages the intuition to be more present. Its information is then more accessible and the conscious mind finds less reason to question, analyse or judge intuitive insights.
The primary skills needed for easy access and trust of intuitive information are: (1) The ability to get out of the way. (2) The ability to accept the information without judgment.
Two easy ways to access intuition and help the conscious mind get out of the way occur: (3) Focus your attention in your abdominal area and imagine you have a "belly brain.” As you feel into and sense this area, "listen" to what your belly brain has to say. This is often referred to as listening to our "gut feelings." (4) With your eyes looking down and to your left and slightly de focussed, simply feel into what to say next.
Once the intuition is flowing, it will continue easily, unless it is Formed. The most usual Formage is for which we may become of, and only because the conscious mind's finds within to all judgments of the intuitive information. The best way to avoid this is to get the cooperation of the conscious mind so it will step aside and become the observer when intuition is being accessed. Cosmic Consciousness is an ultra high state of illumination in the human Mind that is beyond that of "self-awareness," and "ego-awareness." In the attainment of Cosmic Consciousness, the human Mind has entered a state of Knowledge instead of mere beliefs, a state of "I know," instead of "I believe." This state of Mind is beyond that of the sense reasoning in that it has attained an awareness of the Universe and its relation to being and a recognition of the Oneness in all things that is not easily shared with others who have not personally experienced this state of Mind. The attainment of Cosmic illumination will cause an individual to seek solitude from the multitude, and isolation from the noisy world of mental pollution.
Carl Jung was a student and follower of Freud. He was born in a small town in Switzerland in 1875 and all his life was fascinated by folk tales, myths and religious stories. Nonetheless, he had a close friendship with Freud early in their relationship, his independent and questioning mind soon caused a break.
Jung did not accept Freud’s contention that the primary motivations behind behaviour was sexual urges. Instead of Freud’s instinctual drives of sex and aggression, Jung believed that people are motivated by a more general psychological energy that pushes them to achieve psychological growth, self-realization, psychic wholeness and harmony. Also, unlike Freud, he believed that personality continues to develop throughout the lifespan.
It is for his ideas of the collective unconscious that students of literature and mythology are indebted to Jung. In studying different cultures, he was struck by the universality of many themes, patterns, stories and images. These same images, he found, frequently appeared in the dreams of his patients. From these observations, Jung developed his theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypes.
Like Freud, Jung posited the existence of a conscious and an unconscious mind. A model that psychologists frequently use here is an iceberg. The part of the iceberg that is above the surface of the water is seen as the conscious mind. Consciousness is the part of the mind we know directly. It is where we think, feel, sense and intuit. It is through conscious activity that the person becomes an individual. It’s the part of the mind that we “live in” most of the time, and contains information that is in our immediate awareness, the level of the conscious mind, and the bulk of the ice berg, is what Freud would call the unconscious, and what Jung would call the “personal unconscious.” Here we will find thoughts, feelings, urges and other information that is difficult to bring to consciousness. Experiences that do not reach consciousness, experiences that are not congruent with whom we think we are, and things that have become “repressed” would make up the material at this level. The contents of the personal unconscious are available through hypnosis, guided imagery, and especially dreams. Although not directly accessible, material in the personal unconscious has gotten there sometime during our lifetime. For example, the reason you are going to school now, why you picked a particular shirt to wear or your choice of a career may be a choice you reached consciously. But it is also possible that education, career, or clothing style has been influenced by a great deal of unconscious material: Parents’ preferences, childhood experiences, even movies you have seen but about which you do not think when you make choices or decisions. Thus, the depth psychologist would say that many decisions, indeed some of the most important ones that have to do with choosing a mate or a career, are determined by unconscious factors. But still, material in the personal unconscious has been environmentally determined.
The collective unconscious is different. It’s like eye colour. If someone were to ask you, “How did you get your eye colour,” you would have to say that there was no choice involved – conscious or unconscious. You inherited it. Material in the collective unconscious is like a dramatization for this as self bequeathed. It never came from our current environment. It is the part of the mind that is determined by heredity. So we inherit, as part of our humanity, a collective unconscious; the mind is pre-figured by evolution just as is the body. The individual is linked to the past of the whole species and the long stretch of evolution of the organism. Jung thus placed the psyche within the evolutionary process.
What’s in the collective unconscious? Psychological archetypes. This idea of psychological archetypes is among Jung’s most important contributions to Western thought. An ancient idea somewhat like Plato’s idea of Forms or “patterns” in the divine mind that determine the form material objects will take, and the archetype is in all of us. The word “archetype” comes from the Greek “Arche” meaning first, and type meant to “imprinting or patterns.” Psychological archetypes are thus first prints, or patterns that form the basic blueprint for major dynamic counterparts of the human personality. For Jung, archetypes pre-exist in the collective unconscious of humanity. They repeat themselves eternally in the psyches of human beings and they determine how we both perceive and behave. These patterns are inborn within us. They are part of our inheritance as human beings. They reside as energy within the collective unconscious and are part the psychological life of all peoples everywhere at all times. They are inside us and they are outside us. We can meet them by going inward to our dreams or fantasies. We can meet them by going outward to our myths, legends, literature and religions. The archetype can be a pattern, such as a kind of story. Or it can be a figure, such as a kind of character.
In her book Awakening the Heroes Within, Carolyn Pearson identifies twelve archetypes that are fairly easy to understand. These are the Innocent, the Orphan, the Warrior, the Caregiver, the Seeker, the Destroyer, the Lover, the Creator, the Ruler, the Magician, the Sage, and the Fool. If we look at art, literature, mythology and the media, we can easily identify some of these patterns. One familiarized is the contemporary western culture is the Warrior. We find the warrior myth encoded in all the great heroes whoever took on the dragon, stood up to the tyrant, fought the sorcerer, or did battle with the monster: And in so doing rescued himself and others. The true Warrior is not just overbearing. The aggressive man (or women) fights to feel superior to others, to keep them down. The warrior fights to protect and ennoble others. The warrior protects the perimeters of the castle or the family or the psyche. The warrior’s myth is active in each of us any time we stand up against unfair authority, be it a boss, teacher or parent. The highest level warrior has at some time confronted his or her own inner dragons. We see the Warrior’s archetype in the form of pagan deities, for example the Greek god of war, Mars. David, who fights Goliath, or Michael, who casts Satan out of Heaven is familiar Biblical warrior. Hercules, Xena (warrior princess) and Conan the Barbarian are more contemporary media forms the warrior takes. And it is in this widely historical variety that we can find an important point about the archetype. It really is unconscious. The archetype is like the invisible man in famous story. In the story, a man invents a potion that, when ingested, renders him invisible. He becomes visible only when he puts on clothes. The archetype is like this. It remains invisible until it unfolds within the Dawn of its particular culture: in the Middle Ages this was King Arthur; in modern America, it may be Luke Skywalker. But if the archetype were not a universal pattern imprinted on our collective psyche, we would not be able to continue to recognize it over and over. The love goddess is another familiar archetypal pattern. Aphrodite to the Greeks, Venus to the Romans, she now appears in the form of familiar models in magazines like “Elle” and “Vanity Fair.” And whereas in ancient Greece her place of worship was the temple, today is it the movie theatre and the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom’s. The archetype remains; the garments it dawns are those of its particular time and place.
This brings us to our discussion of the Shadow as archetype. The clearest and most articulate discussion of this subject is contained in Johnson’s book Owning Your Own Shadow. The Shadow is not a difficult concept. It is merely the “dark side” of the psyche. It’s everything that doesn’t fit into the Persona. The word “persona” comes from the theatre. In the Roman theatre, characters would put on a mask that represented who the character was in the drama. The word “persona” literally means “mask.” Johnson says that the persona is how we would like to be seen by the world, a kind of psychological clothing that “mediates between our true elves and our environment” in much the same way that clothing gives an image. The Shadow is what doesn’t fit into this Persona. These “refused and unacceptable” characteristics don’t go away; They are stuffed or repressed and can, if unattended to, begin to take on a life of their own. One Jungian likens the process to that of filling a bag. We learn at a very young age that there are certain ways of thinking, being and relating that are not acceptable in our culture, and so we stuff them into the shadow bag. In our Western culture, particularly in the United States, thoughts about sex are among the most prevalent that are unacceptable and so sex gets stuffed into the bag. The shadow side of sexuality is quite evident in our culture in the form of pornography, prostitution, and topless bars. Psychic energy that is not dealt within a healthy way takes a dark or shadow form and begins to take on a life of its own. As children our bag is fairly small, but as we get older, it becomes larger and more difficult to drag.
Therefore, it is not difficult to see that there is a shadow side to the Archetypes discussed earlier. The shadow side to the warrior is the tyrant, the villain, the Darth Vader, who uses his or her skills for power and ego enhancement. And whereas the Seeker Archetype quests after truth and purity, the shadow Seeker is controlled by pride, ambition, and addictions. If the Lover follows his/her bliss, commits and bonds, the shadow lover signifies a seducer a sex addict or interestingly enough, a puritan.
But we can use the term “shadow” in a more general sense. It is not merely the dark side of a particular archetypal pattern or form. Wherever Persona is, Shadow is also. Wherever good is, is evil. We first know the shadow as the personal unconsciousness, for in all that we abhor, deny and repressing power, greed, cruel and murderous thoughts, unacceptable impulses, morally and ethically wrong actions. All the demonic things by which human beings betray their inhumanity to other beings are shadow. Shadow is unconscious. This is a very important idea. Since it is unconscious, we know it only indirectly, projection, just as we know the other Archetypes of Warrior, Seeker and Lover. We encounter the shadow in other people, things, and places where we project it. The scape goat is a perfect example of shadow projection. The Nazi’s projection of shadow onto the Jews gives us some insight into how powerful and horrific the archetype is. Jung says that when you are in the grips of the archetype, you don’t have it, it has you.
This idea of projection raises an interesting point. It means that the shadow stuff isn’t “out there” at all; it is really “in here”; that is inside us. We only know it is inside us because we see it outside. Shadow projections have a fateful attraction to us. It seems that we have discovered where the bad stuff really is: in him, in her, in that place, there! There it is! We have found the beast, the demon, the bad guy. But does Obscenity really exist, or is what we see as evil all merely projection of our own shadow side? Jung would say that there really is such a thing as evil, but that most of what we see as evil, particularly collectively, is shadow projection. The difficulty is separating the two. And we can only do that when we discover where the projection ends. Hence, Johnson’s book title “Owning Your own Shadow.”
Amid all the talk about the "Collective Unconscious" and other sexy issues, most readers are likely to miss the fact that C.G. Jung was a good Kantian. His famous theory of Synchronicity, "an accusal connecting principle," is based on Kant's distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves and on Kant's theory that causality will not operate among thing-in-themselves the way it does in phenomena. Thus, Kant could allow for free will (unconditioned causes) among things-in-themselves, as Jung allows for synchronicity ("meaningful coincidences"). Next to Kant, Jung is close to Schopenhauer, praising him as the first philosopher he had read, "who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundamentalists of the universe" [Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 69]. Jung was probably unaware of the Friesian background of Otto's term "numinosity" when he began to use it for his Archetypes, but it is unlikely that he would object to the way in which Otto's theory, through Fries, fits into Kantian epistemology and metaphysics.
Jung's place in the Kant-Friesian tradition is on a side that would have been distasteful to Kant, Fries, and Nelson, whose systems were basically rationalistic. Thus Kant saw religion as properly a rational expression of morality, and Fries and Nelson, although allowing an aesthetic content to religion different from morality, nevertheless did not expect religion to embody much more than good morality and good art. Schopenhauer, Otto, and Jung all represent an awareness that more exists to religion and to human psychological life than this. The terrifying, uncanny, and fascinating elements of religion and ordinary life are beneath the notice of Kant, Fries, and Nelson, while they are indisputable and irreducible elements of life, for which there must be an account, with Schopenhauer, Otto, and Jung. As Jung once, again said of Schopenhauer: "He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil - all those things that the others hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility." It is an awareness of this aspect of the world that renders the religious ideas of "salvation" meaningful; yet "salvation" as such is always missing from moralistic or aesthetic renderings of religion. Only Jung could have written his Answer to Job.
Jung's great Answer to Job, indeed, represents an approach to religion that is all but unique. Placing God in the Unconscious might strike most people as reducing him to a mere psychological object; Nevertheless, that is to overlook Jung's Kantianism. The unconscious, and especially the Collective Unconscious, belongs to Kantian things-in-themselves, or to the transcendent Will of Schopenhauer. Jung was often at pains not to complicate his theory of the Archetypes by committing himself to a metaphysical theory - he wanted the theory to work whether he was talking about the brain or about the Transcendent - but that was merely a concession to the materialistic bias of contemporary science. He had no materialistic commitment himself and, when it came down to it, was not going to accept such naive reductionism. Instead, he was willing to rethink how the Transcendent might operate. Thus, he says about Schopenhauer: I felt sure that by "Will" he really meant God, the Creator, and that he was saying that God was blind. Since I knew from experience that God was not offended by any blasphemy, which on the contrary, he could even encourages it on the account that He wished to evoke not only man's bright and positive side but also his darkness and ungodliness, Schopenhauer's view did not distress me.
The Problem of Evil, which for so many people simply dehumanizes religion, and which Schopenhauer used to reject the value of the world, became a challenge for Jung in the psychoanalysis of God. The God of the Bible is indeed a personality, and seemingly not always the same one. God as a morally evolving personality is the extraordinary conception of Answer to Job. What Otto saw as the evolution of human moral consciousness, Jung turns right around on the basis of the principle that the human unconscious, expressed spontaneously in religious practice and literature, transcends mere human subjectivity. But the transcendent reality in the unconscious is different in kind from consciousness. As Jung said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections again: If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention. Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes - the second cosmogony [ed. note: what Teilhard de Chardin called the origin of the "oosphere," the layer of "mind"]. The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain - found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge.
In other words, a "meaningful coincidence." Jung also says, As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
However, Jung has missed something there. If consciousness is "the light in the darkness of mere being," consciousness alone cannot be the "sole purpose of human existence," since consciousness as such could appear as just a place of "mere being" and so would easily become an empty, absurd, and meaningless Existentialist existence. Instead, consciousness allows for the meaningful instantiation of existence, both through Jung's process of Individuation, by which the Archetypes are given unique expression in a specific human life, and from the historic process that Jung examines in Answer to Job, by which interaction with the unconscious alters in turn the Archetypes that come to be instantiated. While Otto could understand Job's reaction to God, as the incomprehensible Numen, Jung thinks of God's reaction to Job, as an innocent and righteous man jerked around by God's unconsciousness. Jung's idea that the Incarnation then is the means by which God redeems Himself from His morally false position in Job is an extraordinary reversal (I hesitate to say "deconstruction") of the consciously expressed dogma that the Incarnation is to redeem humanity.
It is not too difficult to see this turn in other religions. The compassion of the Buddhas in Mahâyâna Buddhism, especially when the Buddha Shakyamuni comes to be seen as the expression of a cosmic and eternal Dharma Body, is a hand of salvation stretched out from the Transcendent, without, however, the complication that the Buddha is ever thought responsible for the nature of the world and its evils as their Creator. That complication, however, does occur with Hindu views of the divine Incarnations of Vishnu. Closer to a Jungian synthesis, on the other hand, is the Bahá'í theory that divine contact is though "Manifestations," which are neither wholly human nor wholly divine: merely human in relation to God, but entirely divine in relation to other humans. Such a theory must appear Christianizing in comparison to Islam, but it avoids the uniqueness of Christ as the only Incarnation in Christianity itself. This is conformable to the Jungian proposition that the unconscious is both a side of the human mind and a door into the Transcendent. When that door opens, the expression of the Transcendent is then conditioned by the person through which it is expressed, possessing that person, but it is also genuinely Transcendent and reflecting the ongoing interaction that the person historically embodies. The possible "mere being" even of consciousness then becomes the place of meaning and value.
Whether "psychoanalysis” as practised by Freud or Jung is to be taken seriously and no less than questions asked; however both men will survive as philosophers long after their claims to science or medicine may be discounted. Jung's Kantianism enables him to avoid the materialism and reductionism of Freud ("all of the civilization is a substitute for incest") and, with a great breadth of learning, employs principles from Kant, Schopenhauer, and Otto that are easily conformable to the Kant-Friesian tradition. The Answer to Job, indeed, represents a considerable advance beyond Otto, into the real paradoxes that are the only way we can conceive transcendent reality.
In the state of Cosmic Consciousness has an individual developed a keen awareness of his own mental states and activities and that of others around him or her. This individual is aware of a very distinct "I" personality that empowers the individual with a powerful expression of the "I am" that is not swayed or moved by the external impressions of the trifling mental states of others. This individual stands on a "rock solid" foundation that is not easily understood by the common mind. Cosmic Consciousness is void of the "superficial" ego.
The existence of the conscious "I" and the "Subconscious Mind" on the Mental Plane is a manifestation of the seventh Hermetic principle, the Principle of Gender. Every human, male and female, is composed of the Masculine and Feminine aspect of Mind on the Mental Plane. Each male has its female element, and each female has its male element of Mental Gender from which the creation of all thoughts proceed. The "I" being the masculine aspect of Mind, and the Subconscious Mind being the feminine. The Principle of Gender manifests itself as male and female in all species of Life and Being that makes the sexual reproduction and multiplication of the species possible on the Great Physical Plane. The phenomena of this principle can be found in all three great groups of life manifestations, as questionably answered to those that are duly respected thereof, that in the Spiritual, Mental, and Physical plane of Life and Being.
On the Physical Plane, its role is recognized as sexual reproduction, while on the higher planes it takes on higher, more subtler functions of Mental and Spiritual Gender. Its role is always in the direction of reproduction, generation and regeneration. The Masculine and Feminine principles are always present and active in all phases of phenomena and every plane of Life. An understanding in the manifesting power of this Principle, will give us a greater understanding of ourselves and an awareness of the enormous latent power awaiting to be tapped.
In the Spiritual developed individual, the person who becomes aware of, and recognizes the conscious "I," or "I am" within, will be able to exert its will upon the subconscious mind with definite causation and purpose. The recognition and awareness of the "I," will enable a person to expand his or her mind into regions of consciousness that is unthinkable to the societal conditioned thinking process of the world community.
True Spiritual, or Mental development, enables the sharpening of the five bodily senses, enhancing the richness of Life as our minds are allowed to expand into advanced Spiritual knowledge. Knowledge that will enable the proper use of the five wonderful bodily senses as they report to us the external world from which we derive information to store in the memory banks of the brain to create a knowledge base of experience. The greater the Conscious awareness, the more acute the bodily senses become. At the same time, the lesser the Conscious awareness (nonmaterial sixth sense), the minor acutely of the five bodily senses become and considerably of our external world would not even be acknowledged. This difference of mental states is most likely the cause of debate between religious and scientific circles.
The "I" Consciousness in each human is the true "Higher Self." The "Higher Self" of each human exists as a constant moving whirlpool of Cosmic Consciousness, or an eddy in the Infinite Spirit of "The all," which manifest’s LIFE in all of us and all living entities of the lower and higher planes. The "I" within all of us for being apart of the Mind but not separated exists in all of us and is the instrument of the conscious "I." It is Eternal and indestructible and mortality and Immortality is not an issue in existence. There is no force in existence capable of destroying the "I." This "I" or "Higher Self" is the SOUL of the Soul and is holographically connected to The all, giving the powerful "I" the Image of its Creator. All of us are created in the image of GOD without any exceptions or exclusions and none can escape its Omnipresent Infinite Living Mind. The all, of being the Ruler of all fate, or destiny, in all peoples, nations, governments, religious institutions, suns, worlds, galaxies, planes, dimensions, and Universes. All are subject to its Wills and Efforts, and is the Law that keeps all things in relationship to their Source. There is no "existence" outside of The all.
When the particular "I" is consciously recognized within ourselves, the "Will" of "I" is powerfully exerted upon the Subconscious Mind, giving the Subconscious Mind purpose and a sense of direction in Life. The Mind is the instrument by which the conscious "I" pries open the many deep, and hidden secrets of Nature.
To cause advancement, each individual would have to initiate the effort in learning the deep secrets of their nature, setting aside all the trifling efforts of self-condemnation, low self esteem, and hurts in their daily living that is caused by allowing the ignorant brainwashing of societal conditioning and self inflicted wounds. All the brainwashing, and imagined hurts that we experience in our lives are lessons to overcome these obstacles and to learn, and recognize the powerful "I."
Only the person who created the negative state of Mind can eliminate this by making a fundamental change in the way they think and what is held in their thoughts and to allow them the Spiritual education that is needed in for advancement. There is no red carpet treatment or royal road in accomplishing this. It takes a will, a desire, diligent effort, and perseverance in cultivating this knowledge. The resulting rewards of this attainment will far exceed the greatest worldly rewards known to humanity.
Most people fail to recognize this reality and they will unconsciously and painfully race through Life from cradle to grave and not even experience a momentary glimpse of this great Truth.
The "I," when recognized in a conscious and deliberate manner, will enable a person to accomplish things in Life that is limited only to his or her own imagination. The accomplishments of educators, scientists, engineers, and leaders, who make up the smaller percentage of the world population, have to a degree recognized this "I" within themselves, mostly in an unconscious manner, nevertheless, many have accomplished successful professional careers. They have accomplished a mental focus on a subject (or object), that escaped the ability of most people, giving them a sense of direction and a meaningful purpose in society. Every human is capable of accomplishing this, if they will only learn to focus and concentrate on one subject at a time.
When the will of "I" is utilized and exerted in an unrecognized and unconscious manner, it becomes misused and abused, bringing misery to the individual and others around him or her. Often, is this reality seen in the work place between people and where persons are in a position of authority, such as supervisors, managers, directors, etc., who bring misery to themselves and to their workers because of the powerful will of the unrecognized "I" or "I am." This aspect will cause a lack of harmony in an individual corporate, or company structure and at times bring chaos to the organization when enough of these types of individuals are employed in one place. Teamwork becomes a very labouring effort as competition between employees becomes its theme causing discontent and thus reducing the efficiency of a corporate environment. There is strength in number, either positive or negative. The realm of Spirit affects all levels of our society.
When the human Mind learns to become focussed on a single object or subject at a time, without wandering, excluding all other objects/subjects waiting in line, the Mind is capable of gathering previously unknown energy and information about a given subject or object. The entire world of that person seems to revolve in such a manner that it would bring them information from the unknown regions of the Mind. This is true meditation, to gather information about the unknown while being in a focussed meditative state of Mind. Each true meditation should bring a person information that will cause his or her Mind to expand with Knowledge, especially, when the focal point of concentration is that of Spirit. A person who learns to master this mental art will find that the proper books will manifest into their Life and bring to them the missing puzzles of Life. Books that will draw the attention of an individual on a given subject, and when the new knowledge is applied to the individual's Mind, it is allowed to expand further upon the subject by allowing the Mind to gather additional information and increasing the knowledge base, causing further advancement for others as well.
The mental art of concentration by employing the exertion of the will and creating desire upon a given subject or object is very rare because the lazy human mind is content with wandering twirlingly through Life. The untrained average human Mind is constantly rapidly wandering from one subject/object to another and is unable to focus on a single subject because of the constant carousel of external impressions of objects from the surrounding material world. The untrained mind is constantly jumping from one subject/object to another, like the jumping around of a wild monkey, never able to pause for a moment, to concentrate, and focalize long enough to allow the Mind to gather information about a given subject or object. This is what thinking is. To allow the Mind to gather information about the unknown. When this is disallowed, a person will wander aimlessly through Life and maintaining an ignorant state of Mind.
Wandering aimlessly through Life is a dangerous mental state to maintain because of the possible danger of other minds with stronger wills and efforts to manipulate the person who has not taken responsibility in the discipline and control of their own mind. A person having no control of their own responsibilities are more to wander of mind, having no control in Life's destiny because of the lack of focus and direction in Life. It can be compared with a rudderless ship that is constantly tossed by the rise and fall of the waves from the powerful ocean.
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