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Some Important Issues in Philosophy |
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The Origin of Ideas A Critique of Some Philosophical Positions by Celestine N. Bittle, O.F.M.Cap.
INDEX: Man has always considered himself superior to the brute animal. Evidence for his superiority was found in man's power to think. When philosophy came into existence in ancient Greece, the problem of the nature and origin of ideas in the human mind was bound to arise sooner or later. The problem received a sharp impetus under Socrates. Plato, Socrates' disciple, made it the very heart of his philosophical system. And from that time on up to the present day, the problem has engrossed the attention of the greatest thinkers. The problem can be formulated briefly as follows: how do ideas originate? Ideas are fundamentally distinct from sensations and images because of the abstract, universal character of ideas. Nevertheless, ideas are derived somehow from the sensible and are rooted in the sensible. This will receive confirmation from a study of the various systems of philosophic thought which have been advanced in the course of the centuries as an explanation of the origin of ideas. Roughly, all theories on the subject can be grouped into three main classes:
This essay deals only with the first and second theories and those who have promulgated them or supported them. For a discussion of the third theory (classical realist, peripatetic, artistotelian-scholastic), see The Problem of Knowledge: A brief introduction to epistemology. Plato (427-347 B.C.E.) was aware that the world of sense and sense objects is in a state of continuous change. From the fact of continuous change he concluded that there is nothing real and stable in the sense world. The universal ideas, however, have a content which is stable, real, unchangeable, eternal; the knowledge acquired through universal ideas is truly "science." Unless we are willing to admit that the scientific knowledge acquired through universal ideas is an illusion and a fiction, these ideas must be the representation of objective reality; and since the reality of the sense world is always changing and are not eternal, it cannot be the reality of the sense world which is represented in the universal ideas. Hence, the existence of universal ideas in the human minds demands the existence of a supra-mundane world of pure essences, which are stable, real, unchangeable, and eternal and of which the universal ideas of man are a true representation. These pure essences Plato called Ideas. The Ideas alone have reality in the strict sense; they exist as real entities (noumena) apart from the world of sense (phenomena). The objects of the sense world are but faint, changing replicas or imitations of the eternal, unchanging Ideas; the Ideas are the eternal prototypes or exemplars of the objects of the sense world. The universal ideas of the human mind are true representations of these noumenal Ideas and cannot have their origin in the changeable and changing objects of this visible universe. It follows, according to Plato, that men's souls must have had a preexistence in a former life in the noumenal world, where they contemplated the Ideas as these Ideas existed in themselves. On being united to the body in its present earthly existence, the soul forgot the knowledge of the Ideas, but the universal ideas thus acquired slumber in the soul until awakened; they lie innate in the recesses of the mind. For every object existing in the universe (tree, dog, house, rose, etc.) there exists a corresponding Idea in the noumenal world. On seeing such an object in the present life (some individual tree, dog, etc.), we remember what we have known before and have forgotten: the innate slumbering universal idea is awakened and brought to consciousness. Hence, Plato's theory of innate ideas is also called the theory of reminiscence. Criticism For one thing, Plato supposes that the connection between body and soul in man's earthly life is forced and unnatural; the relationship between the two is extrinsic, similar to the relationship between a horse (body) and its rider (soul). In this view, death should be a welcome event, a release for the soul from the imprisonment in the body. We know, however, that man dreads death. Man is by nature, as all evidence proves, a psycho-physiological integral organism. The dread of death shows clearly that the union of body and soul is natural. If their union were merely extrinsic, it is inexplicable how the union of the body with the soul could blot out the knowledge of the Ideas formerly contemplated, because the body could not possibly influence the inner activities of the soul. Aristotle opposed Plato's theory on the grounds that it is poetic and fantastic and contrary to the testimony of consciousness. If we actually had a former existence, the awakening of the innate universal ideas should also revive the memory of this previous existence itself. But we have no such memory. The theory is pure assumption on the part of Plato. Finally, we acquire our universal ideas from sensible objects through a process of abstraction. There is no need to have recourse to a noumenal world of Ideas and a previous existence in order to explain a process of knowledge which is as natural to man as sensation and perception. René Descartes (1596-1650) taught that man's body and soul, though united, are two intrinsically independent substances. The essence of the soul is thought or "thinking," and the essence of the body is extension, and the two have nothing in common. There can be no cognitional communication between body and mind, because the disparity between them is too great. The body is merely a machine. "Corporeal movements" reach the brain, and at the occasion of their presence the mind produces the ideas or representations of external and extended objects entirely in itself and by itself. Descartes denied the necessity of innate ideas which would be something distinct from the intellect itself. Because the intellect is innate to man, the ideas of the intellect are also innate, in the sense that a disease is innate to the man who is born with the disposition for this disease. The intellect, according to Descartes' theory, is the exclusive cause of all knowledge. Descartes thus considered ideas to be present in the mind from the beginning as "dispositions," and these dispositions are not derived from sense objects; ideas are potentially existing and subsequently become actual. His theory amounts to innatism. Most of Descartes' followers assert that at least some fundamental ideas are innate, such as the ideas of "God," our own "existence," "good," "evil," "free will," and others. We have a "habitual" knowledge of these, and this knowledge becomes "actual" when the intellect turns its attention to these innate "forms" of knowledge. Criticism Descartes placed an ultra-spiritualistic interpretation on the mind and an ultra-mechanistic interpretation on the body; the result was an ultra-dualism in the concept of "man" which made it impossible to explain human intellectual knowledge in a natural manner. Descartes had no right to restrict the essence of the mind to "thought." If the activities of man are such that the triple functions of vegetancy, sentiency, and "thinking" are integrated operations of one and the same psycho-physiological organism, then Descartes committed an unpardonable error in limiting the essence of mind to "thought" alone. That man is an integral organism is amply proved by our experience. Descartes' ultra-dualism is thereby disproved and with it the necessity of trying to explain the origin of our ideas through innatism. All bodily and sensory functions are accompanied by coenesthic (common general organic) sensations of some sort, making us aware of the body and bodily conditions as our own. Such sensations always involve an obscure feeling of the existence of the "Ego"; the origin of the idea of the "Ego" is thus explained, so that there is no need to consider it as innate. As for the ideas of "God" and other supra-sensible objects, we know that they are analogous ideas developed from ideas derived from sensible objects by heightening their perfections and denying their imperfections. It should be clear that the sense organs are not mere mechanical structures and contrivances. They are vital instruments of knowledge which contribute actively their own part to the production of knowledge. Since they are extended organs, sensible objects can affect them through stimuli; since they are vital organs, they can respond vitally to the stimuli and furnish a cognitional representation of the objects in perception. Through abstraction from these sense representations the intellect, organically united to the body and its senses, can form ideas. Nothing more is needed. Leibniz (1646-1716) tried to overcome the ultra-dualism of Descartes in a unique way. All beings consist ultimately of monads. A monad is an elementary individual being, psychical or spiritual in nature. God is a monad; spirits are monads; the human soul is a monad. Even physical being consists ultimately of monads; thus, the body of man is a system of monads. There is no interaction between the single monads. All possess the "power of representation," and each monad in its representation mirrors within itself whatever takes place in all other monads throughout the universe; some do it consciously, like the mind-monads, others unconsciously, like the body-monads. Monads are "windowless," so that no knowledge is acquired from without but is developed from within. All ideas, therefore, are innate, present from the beginning as dispositions or "natural virtualities" until evoked into actuality in the consciousness. Criticism Monadism is a gratuitous theory, artificial in the extreme, without any foundation in fact. The existence of such a universe of monads is a pure assumption. It disrupts the human organism into an aggregate of independent individual monads. It is disproved by the existence of the nervous system in man, which centers in the cerebral cortex as the evident center of sensory knowledge in response to stimuli reaching it from the peripheral organs. Monadism leads to solipsism, that extreme form of subjective idealism which maintains that man can know nothing but his own subjective internal mental states, without the possibility of ever knowing whether anything objective corresponds to his ideas. Ontologists, chief among whom are Malebranche (1638-1715), Rosmini (1797-1855), and Gioberti (1801-1852), assert that God and the divine Ideas are the primary objects of the intellect, and the first act of the intellect is the intuition of God. They base their view on the grounds that material objects can make no impression on an unextended intellect; the intellect, therefore, can derive no ideas from them. The intellect is also too imperfect to derive ideas out of its own nature as such. It beholds them in another spirit, the Infinite Being, whose Ideas are the types and exemplars of all created things. The intellect intuits the Ideas of God and in them acquires a knowledge of creatures. This intuition is possible because God is united to the souls of men in such a manner that one can say that He is in truth "the place of spirits." Criticism If God and the divine Ideas were really the primary object of our intellect and the object first known by it, so that we behold the objects of the sense world in Him and in His Ideas, we should be conscious of this tremendous fact of experience. Needless to say, we are not. Again, if this supposition of the ontologists were true, the existence of God would be indubitably certain to man; doubt would be as impossible in this respect as the doubt about our own existence. Experience, however, shows that we must prove God's existence to our own satisfaction from the facts discovered through a study of the universe. Finally, while ontologists assert that we do not intuit the substance of God, but God and His Ideas only in so far as they are in relation to creatures, this distinction is invalid. In God everything is one and the same infinite reality. To behold the Ideas of God means to behold God's infinite essence and substance. In that case, however, our ideas of God should be direct and positive, not indirect, analogous, and by negation. Kant's Transcendental Criticism Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), alarmed at the trend of thought manifested by the sensationalism of English philosophy, attempted to revindicate the validity of human knowledge and free it from the bane of skepticism prevalent since David Hume. He accepted without question the ultra-realism of Descartes and took as his starting point the principle that the mind of man can know only its own internal states and cannot go outside and beyond the limits of consciousness. He considered it to be the essential error of all previous philosophic systems that they endeavored to make the mind conform to the objects; he would reverse the principle and make the objects conform to the mind. His critique or criticism, therefore, intended to find out whether there existed a knowledge independent of experience. Empirical knowledge has its sources in experience (a posteriori), while knowledge independent of experience has its sources in the mind (a priori). Correspondingly, our ideas will originate either in the mind and be innate or will originate in experience and not be innate. Have we an a priori knowledge? Kant is convinced we have. According to Kant, experience can reveal nothing to us except what is individual and contingent; it never reveals anything that is strictly universal and necessary. If, then, our judgment at any time is thought with strict necessity and universality, such knowledge cannot have been acquired through experience but must be a priori and must proceed directly from the mind itself. Kant admits the existence of noumena or things-in-themselves in the external world, and they affect the senses. The sense faculty responds with an "intuition" or perception. These impressions are unarranged, chaotic. The chaotic "manifold" of sense impressions must be arranged in a certain order by means of two innate sense-forms, namely, space and time. These forms are present in the mind antecedent to all experience. "Space" and "time" are in no way attributes of the things-in-themselves, but are mental forms which condition the perception of the things-in-themselves, so that they appear as arranged in the order of "space" or in the order of "time." Since all things appear in this double order, "space" and "time" are universal and necessary conditions of sense-perception and as such must exist a priori (innately) in the mind. The physical objects themselves, the noumena or things-in-themselves, are, so far as we know, spaceless and timeless. We can know nothing at all about the noumena, because we never perceive them directly. What we "perceive" and know, therefore, is nothing more than the appearances or phenomena of things, and these are subjective in character, possibly without any resemblance to the things-in-themselves. The external, physical world remains forever an unknown "X." Passing from sense-intuition to intellection proper, Kant also finds a number of a priori forms of the pure understanding, and these he terms the categories. According to Kant, to think is to judge. When, therefore, we find judgments that are contingent and particular (e.g., "This table is square"), they result from experience and are a posteriori; but when we find judgments which are necessary and universal (e.g., "The sides of a square are equal to one another"), they must be the result of an a priori element or "form," namely, the "category." These categories express the necessary and universal relation which exists between the subject and predicate of a necessary and universal judgment or proposition. There twelve such relations, and for each relation there exists a corresponding innate a priori category. They are: unity, plurality, totality; reality, negation, limitation; subsistence and inherence, causality and dependence, reciprocity (active and passive); possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexistence, necessity and contingency. These categories are empty forms of intellectual knowledge. The contents of intellectual knowledge must come from experience. After the "manifold" of sense impressions is molded and arranged by the forms of "space" and "time," the categories are applied to these sense intuitions; the result is universal and necessary intellectual knowledge. One must remember, however, that this intellectual knowledge never penetrates to the noumena or things-in-themselves, but only to the phenomena or appearances. Noumenal knowledge is simply impossible. What the physical, noumenal world is like in itself, is forever excluded from the ken of the human mind. Reason, in its inferences, leads us to three fundamental ideas: the idea of the soul, the idea of matter or the totality of phenomena, and the idea God. As such, these ideas are mere a priori forms of the mind and pertain solely to phenomena, having a regulative function only. They are indeed the highest "forms" of the mind, but they are nothing more than "forms," on a level with the forms of "space," "time," and the "categories." Reason, therefore, cannot prove the existence of the soul, of the world, and of God as entities independent of the mind. It is only from the moral law that we know that the soul, matter, and God actually exist; intellectual knowledge reaches only as far as the phenomena. Summing up Kant's doctrine, we find that man is incapable of transcendent knowledge; his knowledge cannot contact the noumenal but only the phenomenal. Man's knowledge is governed completely by transcendental (i.e., a priori, mental) forms. Kant's theory is transcendental idealism. Criticism Entire books have been written on Kant's theory of knowledge. Kant's views led to the great systems of idealism which flourished in the 19th century. They have had their day. As a criticism of his theory, we wish to stress the following points. Kant's final conclusion was that our intellectual knowledge is intrinsically illusory. The intellect can know nothing of the things-in-themselves as they exist in the world around us; it can judge only of phenomena, and the phenomena reveal only the appearances, not the reality, of things as they impress the senses. But the intellect and its operations do not belong to the world of phenomena, because they do not affect the senses; they are an integral part of the mind itself. Since they cannot be phenomena, they must be noumena, things-in-themselves. Kant presumes to give us a thorough description of the intellect and its operations. Either, then, Kant actually did acquire a valid knowledge of noumena, notwithstanding the fact that he claimed we can never know the noumena; or, since all noumenal knowledge is impossible and illusory, his entire theory of the intellect and its operations is illusory and therefore false. In either case his theory breaks down. Kant maintained that a physical world of things-in-themselves, even though we can know nothing about it, actually exists. He assumes its existence on the grounds that the impressions made on the senses must be caused by external objects. Later on, however, he asserts that the concepts of "causality" and "causal dependence" are mere categories, and categories are but "empty forms" contributed by the mind and without objective validity. Either, then, the category of "cause" and "effect" applies validly to noumena and is not an a priori mental form at all; or, if it is an a priori form, Kant is inconsistent in concluding from the existence of sensations to the existence of the noumenal world. Besides, Kant assures us that the noumenal world of things-in-themselves is a chaotic manifold. In giving us this important information, he claims to know something about the objective reality of the world distinct from phenomena. And here again he is inconsistent. Kant's theory is contrary to the science of psychology. He maintains that "space" and "time" are subjective "forms" of the mind, given prior to all experience. The findings of psychology are definitely opposed to this claim. Sensory experience contributes its share to our perception of "space" and "time," as experimental psychology has definitely established. We acquire our knowledge of space and time from a perception of objects which are larger or smaller and which are at rest or in motion. Persons suffering from a congenital cataract have no antecedent knowledge of visual space; after a successful operation, they must acquire knowledge of space through experience and perception. If the subjective mental form of "space" were, as Kant claims, a necessary condition for perception, making the perception of phenomena possible, then there seems to be no valid reason why the mind cannot impose the form of "visual space" upon the incoming impressions, even though a person be congenitally blind. The evidence, however, points clearly to the fact that the knowledge of space on the part of the mind is conditioned by the perception of the objects, and not that the perception of space is conditioned by some a priori form present in the mind antecedent to experience. But if "space is an attribute of bodies, then so is "time," because both are on a par in this respect. Kant's theory is contrary to the fundamental principles of the physical sciences. Kant evolved his theory for the expressed purpose of revindicating scientific knowledge and freeing it from the bane of Hume's skepticism. He failed. Science treats of the physical objects of the extra-mental world and not of mental constructions; Kant's world, however, is a world of phenomena, and these phenomena are mental constructions which give us no insight whatever into the nature and reality of things as they are in themselves. According to Kant's conclusions, the physical, noumenal world is unknown and unknowable. Science is convinced that it contacts and knows real things outside the mind. Science is based on the objective validity of the Principle of Cause and Effect operating between physical objects and physical agencies; according to Kant, this principle is an empty a priori form merely regulating our judgments and applying only to phenomena. The laws which science establishes are considered by scientists to be real laws operating in physical bodies independent of our thinking; according to Kant, these laws merely relate to phenomena within the mind and not to nature at all. Kant states: "It sound no doubt very strange and absurd that nature should have to conform to our subjective ground of apperception, nay, be dependent on it, with respect to her laws. But if we consider that what we call nature is nothing but a whole of phenomena, not a thing by itself, we shall no longer be surprised." (Critique of Pure Reason.) We are indeed surprised that Kant would accept this conclusion of this theory rather than see therein the utter fallaciousness of the theory itself which could consistently lead to such a "very strange and absurd" conclusion. That such a conclusion destroys the validity of science in its very foundations, must be obvious. Kant's theory destroys the foundations of all intellectual knowledge. Ideas and judgments are supposed to reflect and represent reality; they are supposed to tell us "what things are." Truth and error reside in the judgment. In forming judgments we first understand the contents of ideas and then have an intellectual insight into the relation existing between the subject-idea and the predicate-idea. According to Kant, we do not make judgments because we perceive the objective relation of the subject-idea and the predicate-idea, but because a blind, subjectively necessitating law of our mental constitution draws certain sense-intuitions under certain intellectually empty categories prior to our thinking, and we do not know why these particular categories, rather than others, were imposed by the mind on these sense-intuitions. Our "knowledge" is as blind as the law that produces it. Intellectual knowledge is thus utterly valueless, because it gives us no insight into the nature of reality our ideas and judgments are supposed to represent. Kant, in accepting Descartes' ultra-dualistic separation of body and mind, was forced to consider the mind as the sole contributing factor in the formation of universal and necessary ideas, judgments, and inferences. Everything is purely subjective. Subjectivism is the inevitable conclusion of any theory which overlooks the facts that man is an integral psycho-physical organism. The theories of innate ideas or mental forms are thus seen to be false, based on false assumptions.
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