With Anthony Crifasi

Derived primarily from COGNITION AND COMMITMENT IN HUME’S PHILOSOPHY by Don Garrett, Oxford, 1997, chapter 8 “Personal Identity”, pages163-186

Dear Anthony, Jon, Jud, Richard, Dr. Loganathan, and all,

This is what I have been preoccupied with, but which is also fundamentally relevant to all other letter-series, including Laurence Paul Hemming, that I have been carrying on. I know this seems to be drifting far away from Hume, or Aristotle as ‘empiricist’, but in fact it highlights precisely the problem that Hume states so ambiguously at TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, 2nd. Ed. Selby-Bigge, rev. Nidditch, 1978, Appendix, page 633, that might be tentatively put “Does the self, even as a bundle of perceptions, have a place?” Hume simply says the principles by which he formed the concept “bundle of sensations” contradict each other. But this is Hume judging his concept by strict logic, not “vulgar understanding” which he accepts as common sense that there exists a self. Don Garret says:

Hume’s problem is fundamentally a failure within his cognitive psychology: it is a failure to describe adequately our own representation of ourselves. For on Hume’s original theory, we could not successfully represent to ourselves the existence of qualitatively identical but numerically distinct perceptions existing in the minds of different individuals at the same time. The philosophical moral to be drawn from Hume’s confession is thus not that he could not consistently dispense with an “active” or substantial self, or with a transcendental ego. Nor is it that there could not be personal identity without a personal physical body; that common suggestion, while it may be true, is more materialistic than Hume’s own dilemma demands. Rather the moral is simply that if we are to conceive of two minds as having similar but distinct contents at the same time, they must somehow be given either a spatial location or some substitute for it that can serve the same purpose of individuation. Since Hume has already rejected a quasi-spiritual location for minds (THN 253), he correctly sees inherence in mental substance and real necessary connections among perceptions as the only apparent ways out of his dilemma. COGNITION AND COMMITMENT IN HUME’S PHILOSOPHY, Oxford, 1997, pages 185-186

I do not know how far I agree with this, but I do know the “reality” of the “self”, or lack thereof, is key to all other philosophical issues. The key to the above passage is not “the existence of other minds”. That will always remain logically merely a presupposition and pragmatic assumption to act upon. It is, rather, if I cannot experience the identity in other minds, how do I know I experience even my own? Don Garret says:

It is certainly true that Hume thinks that he has immediate access to his own present (GCM: “Now”) ideas. But he finds it deeply problematic to determine why certain past ideas, to which “someone” has immediate access, count as “his”, and correlatively, he finds it problematic to determine what the “he”, who has this immediate access, actually is and how this individual can be conceived in the imagination. In finding these matters so problematic, it may be noted, he is following another practitioner of the way of ideas, John Locke, and if Hume and Locke had not found these matters so problematic, then they would not have written about personal identity as they did. Hume’s project in TREATISE I. iv. 6 is precisely to investigate what relations produce associative connections among perceptions—the latter considered as logically independent, noninhering, and often unlocated entities—sufficient to make them count as the mind of one person. Hume himself says that his explanation will have to “take the matter pretty deep” (THN 253), and the problem I have described is just the sort of problem one does encounter in taking Hume’s project “pretty deep”. Page 185

Now, I think it is precisely these issues that are occurring in this chapter of Aristotle. In avoiding “innate ideas” or “soul” or “transcendental ego”, I apparently end up with “inherence in mental substance and real necessary connections among perceptions as the only apparent ways out of this dilemma.” I, at this drunken moment, see no apparent problem with this. It does solve my primary ‘distaste’, the priority of words, abstractions, and propositions over sensation and perception. If “universals” have any “reality” they have to be perceptual and not just ‘derived’ and put in a mental/spiritual place aside somewhere. And it would seem the first such perceptual “universal” must be the “mental substance” of the ‘self’. It comes down to a fundamental discarding-question: What can one NOT attribute to imagination? All words, abstractions, and positions necessarily belong in its sphere. Unfortunately, I have to be extremely self-conscious that what is left I must talk about in words. Undifferentiated sense impressions, before imagination and memory connect them to ideas, have two necessary things that “always already” unite them. “Place” as Aristotle’s topos and Sartre’s “personal body” (BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, Part 3, chapter 2, also Merleau-Ponty’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION, also Heidegger’s ZOLLIKON SEMINARS) and the “Now” or “present” as the only real time as in “Moment of Vision” [Augenblick} as described in volume 2 of NIETZSCHE, trans. Krell, 1984, Harper-Collins, chapter 8 “The Convalescent”, pg. 59:

Nietzsche contrasts his concept of eternity with the extrinsic sense of that notion as the “eternally unchanging”: “as opposed to the value of the eternally unchanging (note Spinoza’s naiveté, and Descartes as well), the value of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita.” In the end, Zarathustra hears which eternity it is that his animals (GCM: my italics) are proclaiming to him, the eternity of the Moment that embraces everything in itself at once: the down-going . . . “Downgoing” here means . . . descent as acknowledgment of the abyss . . . grasped in its temporality, in terms of “eternity”, correctly understood. The downgoing itself, thought with a view to eternity, is the Moment; yet not as the fleeting “now”, not as mere passing. Downgoing is indeed the briefest thing, hence the most transient, but is at the same time what is most accomplished (GCM: my italics) . . .

Immediate sensation is absolutely within my whole perception, within which is topos, “place” associating all other sensations. “It is certainly true that Hume thinks that he has immediate access to his own present (GCM: “Now”) ideas (read for now ‘present sensations’, but it applies to ideas as well since they are ‘always already’ there).” It is only in “his” present that the past and future can be thought of and past sensations compared to become “ideas”. “His” or “my” perception, then, operates as the most primitive universal as literally uniting “understanding as a whole . . . related to its object as a whole” [100b16-17].

Gary Moore wrote:

If “universals” have any “reality” they have to be perceptual and not just ‘derived’ and put in a mental/spiritual place aside somewhere. And it would seem the first such perceptual “universal” must be the “mental substance” of the ‘self’.

If you want to call this "perceptual," I don't really have a problem with that, as long as you carefully distinguish intellectual "perception" from Aristotelian aisthesis (which I prefer to call sensation). My main objection was that you were translating aisthesis in PA II. 19 as "perception" while also calling nous perceptual. Aristotle explicitly says that object aisthesis cannot be a universal (PA 87b33).

Loga-3: In the act seeing, the seer is given already as the one who sees. Now from this primordial act of seeing there is a generation of a TEXT with a duality of structure - the DS and SS. The ‘rock’ is seen in the seeing of a person and such seeing of the same rock may differ from individual to individual. We may institute MEASUREMENTS so that over and above the differences in the individual seeing, there can be a sameness for e. g., the density size porosity and so forth. In such cases the primordial act of seeing is re-constituted as the positively objective seeing - the sensorial seeing and nothing else and hence as that which allows measurements. This is the kind of seeing on which Hume (and the bulk of Western philosophers) remain fixated.

GCM3: Anthony Criffasi at the Heidegger Spoons site has made this problematic for me since he argues quite well that nous operates as a kind of innate knowledge which I disagree with but he does distinctly make problematic that knowledge must come in some kind of form outside simple sense impressions.

If nous is not reducible to sense impressions, this does not imply that it is innate. At the beginning of PA II. 19 Aristotle clearly denies the innate knowledge theory. Further, he says the object of nous is the essence of a thing, not merely the innate association of sensations. So Aristotle simply holds that nous is another kind of non-innate experience of the real world

(i. e., of the essences of things) besides aisthesis. The empiricists, however, clearly deny that we can know the essences of things themselves, and therefore fell back on the only other kind of access that Aristotle gave

- sense impressions. That's why they reduced universals to particular impressions and ideas - something Aristotle flatly precluded.

Anthony Crifasi
GCM1: But Barnes concludes, “Aristotle . . . is whole-heartedly

empiricist.”

ANTHONY2: Well, yes and no. Yes he is an empiricist in the sense that

he is clearly saying that universals are drawn from sensory experience, but he is also not an empiricist because the universal that nous grasps is not reducible to a conglomeration of associated sensory impressions (as the empiricists held).

GCM2 Revised: “Nous” as either “intuition or “comprehension” is an ability or capacity “to do” something. “Nous” sees with judgment, krinein, as “AS” or “not AS’. Johnathan Barnes mentions this:

1. “How, then can the gap between particulars and universals be jumped? Aristotle’s answer is that perception in fact gives us universals from the start ( Post. Anal. Bk I, chap. 31, 87b29, notes). He means that we perceive things as As; and that this so to speak, lodges the universal, A, in our minds from the start—although we shall not, of course, have an explicite or articulated understanding of A until we have advanced [further]. It should be noted that this account is intended to hold for ALL perceivers: it is not peculiar to human perception, nor does it involve the intellect in any way. Even a fly sees an F. ([my italics—for “F” see below]Barnes’ commentary on 100a17)

Barnes’ notes on 87b29 refer to the phrase “even if perception is of what is such and such” which he compares to another Aristotle statement:

2. “And similarly perception is affected by what has color or flavor or sound—but not as each of them is called [or J. A. Smith: “not insofar as each is what it is”] but as such and such” (An B 12, 424a21-4; cf. 6, 418a20-5; A Pst B 19, 100a15). When, e. g., I see the son of Diares, the proper object of my perception is a colored thing of such and such a shape. We see individuals incidentally [428a20-23]; i. e., to se a is to see an F (where F is some sensible quality) which in fact is a. Thus perception is, in a sense, ‘of the universal’; and so (one might infer) reports of perception may encapsulate knowledge. Aristotle rejects the final inference, but his rejection relies upon a tenuous distinction between having perception of X and perceiving X. His answer would be something like this: ‘Although a strictly correct reply to the question “What are you perceiving?” must be of the form “an F” or perhaps “That F” and cannot be of the form “a” (where “a” is a proper name), never theless any proposition reporting the contents of your perception must contain or imply some reference to individual objects, times, or places; and this must be so because the act of perception is necessarily tied to some individual time and place.”

This seems essentially correct to me except the distinction between prepositional knowledge, i. e., “reports of perception” and perception itself is blurred. And the use of “understanding” at 87b29 seems emphatically prepositional, i. e., “which we say is universal’. What I am so clumsily trying to do is state the ‘most obvious’ yet least noted: All knowledge must come from perception including the making actual of what was unknown and only potential in the capacities of ‘intuition’ which merely changes the aspect of an undifferentiated sense impression into a differentiated sense impression attracting special attention and thus becoming a “universal’.

“Nous” puts sensations together that fit together. It puts apple with apple instead of apple with horse. It is “reducible”, or better, “grounded” as Aristotle is describing the creation of a universal from sense impressions "taking a stand" and uniting through the capacity to recognize likeness through memory. Aristotle calls this "accounting."

ANTHONY3: The recognition of the universal (nous) may depend on sensations and memory, but that doesn't imply that it is *reducible* to sensation and memory.

GCM3: No, not as the irreducible elements of a naked, undifferentiated sense impression without imagination and feeling and temporality (if that can even happen in reality—the existence of such is essentially theoretical, a construction of the history of thinking, an “always already” fictitious enterprise). To a certain extent this is a pseudo-problem of “Is the glass half full or half-empty?” One does not “reduce” or “descend” to “sensation and memory”, one starts with them as fundamental, and necessarily they are always at hand and always primarily in view as validating what one says. Or, introducing ‘primitive’ morality, should be. They are the primordial standard to judge by. But it is HOW it remains “at hand” constantly (or “eternally” or, better, “ever present”) OR “always and everywhere” that is at question. Because in some sense the universal must have a topos, a place! It must exist somewhere! Someone must have the idea!

POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Book II Beta, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17

SECTION 2

GCM1: But Barnes concludes, "Aristotle . . . is whole-heartedly Empiricist."

ANTHONY2: Well, yes and no. Yes he is an empiricist in the sense that he is clearly saying that universals are drawn from sensory experience, but he is also not an empiricist because the universal that nous grasps is not reducible to a conglomeration of associated sensory impressions
(as the empiricists held).

GCM2 Revised: "Nous" as either "intuition or "comprehension" is an ability or capacity "to do" something. "Nous" sees with judgment, krinein, as "AS" or "not AS'. Johnathan Barnes mentions this:

1. "How, then can the gap between particulars and universals be jumped? Aristotle's answer is that perception in fact gives us universals from the start ( Post. Anal. Bk I, chap. 31, 87b29, notes). He means that we perceive things as As; and that this so to speak, lodges the universal, A, in our minds from the start-although we shall not, of course, have an explicit or articulated understanding of A until we have advanced [further]. It should be noted that this account is intended to hold for ALL perceivers: it is not peculiar to human perception, nor does it involve the intellect in any way. Even a fly sees an F." ([my italics-for "F" see below]Barnes' commentary on 100a17)

ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: If you mean that sensation is 'implicitly' (i. e., non explicitly) universal, then this is no different from the medieval interpretation of Aristotle, nor from what I am saying. For example, Aquinas comments on Aristotle that sensations are potentially intelligible. So that would simply be what you call the 'traditional' interpretation of Aristotle.

GARY C MOORE-4: First of all (I thought I had made it clear), you are commenting upon Barnes' commentary. Secondly, whether one says "explicitly" or "implicitly" sensation is intelligible is a mere contest of empty words. Sensations are sensations, unless you are going to say they are communicating secret messages to you. Of course, sensations can never "explicitly" communicate universals to you. First of all that would assume an external world outside your mind has already been proven to exist, which has not happened. Second, that would assume that sensations are intelligent beings able to "explicitly" communicate universals to you. I do not think you mean either. Of course, it always has to be "implicitly", and, unless you assume some form of communication, the whole process has to be in the individual mind. And if it is in the individual mind, universals have only two ways to logically exist - either as innate ideas (which would mean you have another, other mind within your mind since obviously they are not "my" ideas in any sense) or imagined out of sensational elements and comparisons. There are no other alternatives.

Barnes' notes on 87b29 refer to the phrase "even if perception is of what is such and such" which he compares to another Aristotle statement:

2. "And similarly perception is affected by what has color or flavor or sound-but not as each of them is called [or J. A. Smith: "not insofar as each is what it is"] but as such and such" (An B 12, 424a21-4; cf. 6,
418a20-5; A Pst B 19, 100a15). When, e. g., I see the son of Diares, the proper object of my perception is a colored thing of such and such a shape. We see individuals incidentally [428a20-23]; i. e., to se a is to see an F (where F is some sensible quality) which in fact is a. Thus perception is, in a sense, 'of the universal'; and so (one might infer) reports of perception may encapsulate knowledge. Aristotle rejects the final inference, but his rejection relies upon a tenuous distinction between having perception of X and perceiving X. His answer would be something like this: 'Although a strictly correct reply to the question "What are you perceiving?" must be of the form "an F" or perhaps "That F" and cannot be of the form "a" (where "a" is a proper name), nevertheless any proposition reporting the contents of your perception must contain or imply some reference to individual objects, times, or places; and this must be so because the act of perception is necessarily tied to some individual time and place."

This seems essentially correct to me except the distinction between prepositional knowledge, i. e., "reports of perception" and perception itself is blurred. And the use of "understanding" at 87b29 seems emphatically prepositional, i. e., "which we say is universal'. What I am so clumsily trying to do is state the 'most obvious' yet least noted: All knowledge must come from perception including the making actual of what was unknown and only potential in the capacities of 'intuition' which merely changes the aspect of an undifferentiated sense impression into a differentiated sense impression attracting special attention and thus becoming a "universal'.

ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: I don't think for Aristotle, intuition (or nous) "merely changes the aspect of an undifferentiated sense impression into a differentiated sense impression." That's clear just from Posterior Analytics. 19, because he explicitly says that all animals have sensation
(and therefore the ability to differentiate them - else sensation would be useless), but not that all animals have intuition

GARY C MOORE-4: If nous as intuition merely compares sensations and imagines a fallible likeness that may well change with future experience, then this is merely a physiological "capacity". If it takes raw sense impressions, compares them, and imagines a likeness, this "likeness" must be tested for self-consistency in further sense experience. As one species of animal physiologically differs from another species of animal, and each has their own function and niche for living through their physiological features and therefore different abilities (therefore we do not have to 'assume' different physiological intellectual capacities 'within' their 'minds' which we can know nothing about except through purely external observation), so "intuition" is going to function in a different fashion for each of them. For instance, a snake is not going to be intuiting in terms of "grasping" as in "hexein". And since I am just saying that intuition is simply an ability to compare sensations and imagine a common denominator that might "work" or not "work" in practice, this might well be due to the simian feature of having hands and comparing what is in the left hand with what is in the right hand, to be simplistic, and one sees this is 'like' or 'unlike' that, i. e "the ability to differentiate them - else sensation would be useless" as you said. All intuition is, is the manipulation, as "AS" with hands, of sensation or perception.

"Nous" puts sensations together that fit together. It puts apple with apple instead of apple with horse. It is "reducible", or better, "grounded" as Aristotle is describing the creation of a universal from sense impressions "taking a stand" and uniting through the capacity to recognize likeness through memory. Aristotle calls this "accounting."

ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: Not just any likenesses, but specifically universals. Remember that for Aristotle, all animals have sensations (and therefore can perceive likenesses and differences among them), but not all animals have nous.

GARY C MOORE-4: Likeness ARE universals. They going through a process of testing from being initially imagined as "primitive universals", the likeness first notice as "unique" and therefore a "type" to be compared to other experience that is then criticized as to its "likeness" fitting the experience of similar perceptions and seeing if the likeness is consistent with further experience. Saying "not all animals have nous" is an unverifiable and ambiguous statement even for Aristotle. As far as Aristotle can tell, an animal only "seems" not to have nous or "sweems" not to have memory because of observation of behavior. Since we cannot know the internal mental workings of an animal, being as each species is of a different physiological shape and therefore different function and niche in living, I can simply say, as far as I know, the comparison of likenesses is done in a completely different fashion which, of course, would have to be the case if a species did not have comparable right and left hands.

ANTHONY-3: The recognition of the universal (nous) may depend on sensations and memory, but that doesn't imply that it is *reducible* to sensation and memory.

GCM3: No, not as the irreducible elements of a naked, undifferentiated sense impression without imagination and feeling and temporality (if that can even happen in reality-the existence of such is essentially theoretical, a construction of the history of thinking, an "always already" fictitious enterprise).

ANTHONTY CRIFASI-4: Saying that an impression must be accompanied with imagination, feeling, and temporality is different from saying that it must be accompanied by 'universality' (by the recognition of universality in nous). Aristotle may have held that sensation must be accompanied by the former, but not the latter.

GARY C MOORE-4: I don't seem to remember saying, "accompanied". Saying that an impression is differentiated, made into a uniqueness that gains one's attention because it is painful or tastes good, etc., and therefore, as a "type" becoming comparable to other impressions to present a likeness, is simply differentiating from the undifferentiated. The sensation of pain emphatically does this. It catches your attention and impulsively you look for a 'this' as cause. You have an "impression", you have "imagination, feeling, and temporality", and you compare the situation to other situations possibility like it, very likely instantaneously because very few situations will be equally emphatic and similar. "Likeness" is sufficient for the meaning of "universality". You don't need anything more. "likeness" is the simplest term covering the result of the whole process according to Ockham's razor. The use of "universal" as something more or other than simple "likeness" either needs much more explanation to justify it, as well as calling intuition "nous" as if something more than simple perception and comparison were implied, or it is a mystical apparition. I do not think Aristotle really implied a "more" than experience and its interpretation through comparison.

To a certain extent this is a pseudo-problem of "Is the glass half full or half-empty?" One does not "reduce" or "descend" to "sensation and memory", one starts with them as fundamental, and necessarily they are always at hand and always primarily in view as validating what one says. Or, introducing 'primitive' morality, should be. They are the primordial standard to judge by. But it is HOW it remains "at hand" constantly (or "eternally" or, better, "ever present") OR "always and everywhere" that is at question. Because in some sense the universal must have a topos, a place! It must exist somewhere! Someone must have the idea!

ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: According to Aristotle, there doesn't have to be a universal at all for there to be sensation and memory, since he says that more animals have sensation and memory than have nous.

GARY C MOORE-4: What possible use, then, would there be for memory if there was no comparison? I can reasonably conceive a greater or lesser ability of comparison as well as a greater and lesser ability of memory - of which Aristotle says some animals have none - but I find the later is nonsense, and the having of memory but not the ability at any level whatsoever to compare experience remembered, even if Aristotle or anyone else said it, nonsense. Even for a planarian, this would very quickly lead to extinction. But it has been experimentally demonstrated that a planarian can learn to avoid painful experiences. Therefore a planarian MUST have memory and it MUST use that memory to compare experiences