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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.
Descartes' ultra-dualism of body and mind proved to be a fateful legacy for philosophic thought. His interpretation of the mind or soul, being ultra-spiritualistic, led to extreme idealism. His interpretation of the body, being ultra-mechanistic, led to empiricism, sensationalism, associationism, and materialism. John Locke (1632-1704) followed in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was a sensationalist. Locke strenuously opposed Descartes' doctrine of innate ideas. In the beginning, he says, the mind is devoid of ideas, a "blank sheet." All knowledge has its origin in experience, in sense-perception. Experience is twofold, sensation (perception of external phenomena) and reflection (perception of the operations of the mind itself). From both sources we obtain "ideas." Locke's philosophy centers in his theory of the ideas. Here is his understanding of an idea: "It being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks. I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking." (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.) In this superficial definition Locke unfortunately lumps together as "ideas" things which conceivably be radically different in nature, namely, "phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking." By thus arbitrarily blurring the nature of the "idea" so as to include the images of sense-perception ("phantasm, species"), he laid the foundation for sensism, in which all "thinking" is nothing but a form of "sensation." Descartes placed all sense-perception in the spiritual mind, thus identifying sense-perception with spiritual activity; Locke here does the reverse, by reducing ideas, at least in part, to the level of sense-perception. This confusion of ideas and images is present in all his philosophy. He does not hesitate to assert that the Creator can make matter think: "I see no contradiction in it that the first eternal thinking Being should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of created senseless matter, put together, as he thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perceptions and thought." (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.) Criticism For one thing, Locke simply assumes without proof that "ideas" and "images" are identical. This identification of ideas and images wipes out the distinction between sensory and intellectual knowledge simply by definition. Again, according to his definition of the "idea" the idea is the object of our understanding, instead of the reality of things being the object of our intellectual knowledge. All we can know, then, are "ideas," internal states of mind; in that case, however, we can acquire no knowledge of the material world as it is in itself. If carried out to its logical conclusion, such a theory must inevitably end in subjective idealism. Furthermore, his confusion of "ideas" and "images" led him to the curious conclusion that God can make matter think. The empiricism of Locke made him reduce "thinking" to a property of matter, because he could not bridge the ultra-dualism of Descartes. But God can no more make nonliving matter think than He can make a square circle. Only on the supposition that man is an integral organism, consisting of body and mind, is it possible to explain how sensations can give rise to images, and images to ideas through the process of abstraction. Finally, since all ideas originate either from sensation or from reflection on mental activities, Locke can give no proper explanation of ideas such as "God," "soul," "good," "evil," "spirituality," and a host of similar important ideas. We simply do not experience such realities in any form. Such ideas, then, should not be present in the intellect at all; they are, however, present and must be accounted for, though not according to the principles of Locke's empiricism. Locke's empiricism was developed into a complete system of sensism by Condillac (1715-1780) who reduced the entire contents of the mind to "transformed sensations." Another offshoot of the empiricism of Locke is the positivism of Comte (1798-1857) who maintained that all knowledge is illusory except the "positive" science of phenomena derived from sensation. Sensationalism and Associationism David Hume (1711-1776), accepting the fundamental tenets of Locke's empiricism, was more consistent than Locke and developed a thoroughgoing system of sensationalism. According to Hume, the total content of the mind consists of perceptions. Perceptions are of two kind: "impressions" and "ideas" or "thoughts." Impressions are those perceptions which are more lively and forceful, and they include sensations and emotions. The faint images of these impressions Hume terms ideas or thoughts. Impressions (sensations and emotions) are experienced; ideas or thoughts (faint images of sensations and emotions) are revived in imagination and memory. "Perceptions" thus form the total contents of our mental states, and they are all we can know. We can know nothing of objects or the qualities of objects. Even when we think we perceive our own body and its members, we perceive nothing but "certain impressions which enter by the senses." There is no such thing as a "substance." The mind is nothing but "a heap or collection of different perceptions united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with simplicity and identity." Nothing is left, then, for knowledge but phenomena, subjective mental states, perceptions. As for the cause of the impressions which arise from the senses, Hume professes complete ignorance. Relative to universal ideas, Hume maintains that we find a resemblance between objects and apply the same name to them; then, after a "custom" of this kind has been established, the name revives the "idea," and the imagination conceives the object represented by the "idea." A prominent part of Hume's philosophy is his theory of associationism. We speak, for example, of the Principle of Causality, and consider it to be a universally and necessarily valid axiom that "Every effect must have a cause." Hume claims that this axiom is derived from experience. What we perceive is an invariable sequence of events: one thing invariably follows an antecedent event, and from this sequence we conclude that the antecedent event "causes" the one that follows as an "effect." We do not perceive anything like the "production" of one thing by another. From his phenomenalistic, sensationalistic standpoint, Hume could not admit real "causation." Whenever we observe one event to occur, we feel the mental compulsion to assert that the other will follow. But whence the mental compulsion to conjoin just these two events as "cause" and "effect"? Hume gives as the reason that "the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant and to believe that it will exist." In other words, it is the association of ideas which compels us to formulate necessary and universal judgments, axioms, and principles. Such judgments, axioms, and principles have no objective value, but are mere associations of impressions derived from the succession of phenomena. As for the mental mechanism of association, it finds its explanation in the Laws of Association. Criticism Hume's explanation of ideas as faint images of sense-impressions is totally inadequate. Since both are of a sensory character, they are concrete and individualized. Our ideas, however, are abstract and universal. There is a radical difference between "sensations" and "images" on the one hand and "intellectual ideas" on the other. To ignore or deny these differences is a serious error. Hume's explanation of universal ideas is totally inadequate. The process of forming universal ideas is not at all the way Hume pictures it. We acquire them by a process of abstraction, taking the objective features common to a number of individuals and then generalizing the resultant idea so that it applies to the whole class and to every member of the class. It is not a question of merely labeling objects with a common name. Intellectual insight into the nature of these objective features, not "custom" or habit, enables us to group them together into a class. Hume's explanation of the origin and nature of the necessarily and universally true axioms and principles, such as the Principle of Causality and the Principle of Contradiction, is totally inadequate. He explains their necessity and universality through association. Now, the laws of association are purely subjective laws with a purely subjective result. Consequently, the "necessity" which we experience relative to the logical connection between the subject and predicate in these principles would not be due to anything coming from the reality represented in these judgments, but solely to the associative force existing in the mind. It is a subjective and psychological, not an objective and ontological necessity. The mind does not judge these principles to be true because it sees they cannot be otherwise; it cannot see them to be otherwise because the mind in its present constitution must judge them to be true. So far as objective reality is concerned, 2 plus 2 might equal 3 or 5 or any other number; and there might be a cause without an effect, or an effect without a cause. If Hume's contention were correct, that our observation of "invariable sequence" is the reason for assuming an antecedent event to be the "cause" of the subsequent event, then we should perforce experience the same psychological necessity of judgment in all cases where we notice an invariable sequence in successive events. Experience, however, contradicts this view. For instance, day follows night in an invariable sequence; but nobody would dream of asserting that the night is the "cause" of the day. In an automobile factory one car follows the other on the assembly line in invariable sequence; but this association does not compel us to think that the preceding car is the "cause" of the one following. Reversely, when an explosion occurs but once in our experience, we search for the "cause" of this "effect" are are convinced there must be a cause present; here, however, there can be no question of an "invariable sequence" of events. Hume's theory, if accepted as true, must destroy all scientific knowledge. The very foundation of science lies in the Principles of Contradiction, Sufficient Reason, and Causality. If these principles are valid only for our mind and do not apply with inviolable necessity to physical objects in nature, the scientist has no means of knowing whether his conclusions are objectively valid. His knowledge is nothing but a purely mental construction which may or may not agree with extra-mental reality. But science treats of physical systems and their operations, not of mental constructions. Since, according to Hume, we can know nothing but our internal states of consciousness, we could never discover whether the external world and other minds exist at all; driven to its logical conclusions, such a theory can end only in solipsism or in skepticism. Hume's Laws of Association are valid, of course, in themselves; they were known and accepted, long before his time, by Aristotle and the Schoolmen. Hume, however, makes an illogical and illegitimate use of them, viewed from the standpoint of his own theory. According to Hume, the total content of the mind consists of perceptions (impressions and "ideas" or images). Now, the Laws of Association, considered in themselves, are not perceptions, whether impressions or their images ("ideas"). The Laws of Association control, regulate, and link together these ideas; they are, therefore, over and above the ideas and distinct from them. According to Hume's own principles, then, they do not, and in fact cannot, belong to the content of the mind at all. Yet they are there. According to Hume, the mind is its content. In this view, there is no abiding mind or Ego in which impressions and ideas reside; all we have are perceptions (impressions and ideas) in a continuous flow; there is no mind or Ego distinct from these perceptions. Hume is very emphatic on this point. Theoretically, he denies the existence of "mind" or "Ego"; practically, he cannot, and actually does not, get along without a "mind" or "Ego." He speaks continually of "the mind," "we" and "I," and such terminology is inconsistent, to say the least. As a matter of fact, a "mind" or "Ego" is indispensable and necessary to his theory, notwithstanding his denial of their existence. The reason is plain. The Laws of Association, so basic to his theory, are merely the laws according to which ideas are conjoined; they themselves do not do the conjoining. Something, then, must be present which applies the Laws of Association to the ideas and associates them; without this "something" these laws would be inoperative. Hume cannot explain the operation of these laws without a "mind" or "Ego" to operate them. Thinking demands a thinker, just as motion demands a moving object. Hume's theory is atomistic. It cannot be otherwise. Every sensation, emotion, and idea is a single item of consciousness, similar to an atom in nature. Each, as Hume expressed it, is a "distinct existence." Each is a solitary reality, having only an instantaneous existence; it comes, abides for a moment, and is irrevocably gone. No two items exist simultaneously; one succeeds the other in the flow of conscious events. And the important point is this: there is no "mind" or "Ego," distinct in being from these experiences, which would be an abiding reality behind them, capable of experiencing them. Since each item of experience has but a momentary, isolated, and solitary existence, there is nothing present which could hold them together, compare them, and synthesize them. All we can have is an unrelated, kaleidoscopic succession of items. The formation of general ideas, judgments, and inferences should thus be utterly impossible, since there is no "mind" or "Ego" present to observe whatever relations might exist between ideas or things. But we have such general ideas, judgments, and inferences. Hume's theory, therefore, is utterly false. Hume himself gave expressions to the dilemma of the position in which he had placed himself. He said: "There are two principles which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz., that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connection among them, there would be difficulty in the case." This statement is a frank confession that a "thinking mind or Ego" is necessary to explain our thought processes. But Hume would not accept this conclusion and thereby pronounced the complete failure of his theory of knowledge. He became a skeptic. Hume exerted a tremendous influence on English and American philosophy, an influence which is felt even to this day. Sensationalism and associationism dominated psychology for a long time. Each philosopher treating of psychological subjects introspected his own personal mind and its operations and then proceeded to make dogmatic pronouncements concerning them. Such was the method employed by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, J. Mill, Bain, Spencer, and other prominent English writers. Experimental methods were not used, for the simple reason that experimental psychology was not as yet in existence. The application of experimental methods to psychology did much to remove personal speculation and place psychology on a sounder factual basis. The first consistent experimental investigations into the nature of the thought processes began around the turn of the 20th century. Alfred Binet tested the sensationalist theory, to which he subscribed, through experiments on his two young daughters, expecting to find that thoughts were nothing but images. He came to the definite, and to him amazing, conclusion that "naked thoughts" existed in the mind and that "images" are extraneous to real "thinking." More extended and systematic investigations along these lines were made by the psychologists of the Wurzburg School, prominent among whom were Oswald Kulpe (1862-1915), Marbe, and Buhler. Using the method of proposing questions and problems to their observers, they attempted to find out just what takes place in the mind in the formation of ideas, judgments, and inferences. In this manner they hoped to settle the question whether ideas are identical with images or whether thinking transcends imaging. Sifting the evidence obtained from the subjects concerning their experiences, it was found that images of various types usually were present in the thought processes. The evidence, however, revealed a clear distinction between knowing and sensing or imaging. "Understanding" and "insight" were something totally different from the images. "Meaning" was something over and above the images flitting through the mind during the process of thinking. In may instances, the subjects claimed, ideas were present, but no perceptible image; they experienced imageless thought. In any case, whenever images were present together with ideas, the images were recognized as merely accompanying the ideas, as adventitious to thoughts, and not as constitutive of, or essential to, the meanings. Usually, too, the images were soon forgotten, while the meanings, the ideas, the knowledge remained and were remembered. The psychologists of the Wurzburg School soon learned that a distinction had to be made between the "picturable and unpicturable contents of conscious processes." They mean that some contents of our mind can be "pictured" or "imaged," such as a "house" or "horse," while other contents cannot be "pictured" or "imaged," such as a "negation" or the "will." The latter are ideas. From these and similar facts brought to light in the psychological laboratories of the Wurzburg School, Buhler drew the general conclusion: "What enters into consciousness so sporadically, so very accidentally as our images, cannot be looked upon as the well-knitted, continuous content of our thinking." The main point about all these experiments is not whether thoughts can occur without images, but whether thoughts are identical with images. These psychologists have adduced considerable evidence in favor of imageless thought; but the evidence is not conclusive, and further experiments will have to be made. They have, however, definitely established the fact that ideas are not images. Sensationalism has thus been disproved on experimental grounds. Later experiments, made by Woodworth, Betts, Moore, Clark, Willwoll, Lindworsky, and others, have confirmed the findings of the Wurzburg School. In general, the Wurzburg School agrees with the teachings and principles of classical realism and traditional aristotelian-scholastic philosophy concerning abstraction, universal ideas, judgments and inferences. Experimental methods thus furnish positive proof that intellectual is a supra-sensuous process. E.B. Titchener (1867-1927), the noted head of the department of psychology at Cornell University, disputed the findings of the Wurzburg School. On the strength of the experimental studies conducted under his guidance, he claimed that his observers always thought in images. Titchener, a sensationalist himself, contended that all thought processes can be reduced to "sensations," so that the "sensation" is the "structural unit or element" of everything occurring in consciousness; his theory is therefore sometimes referred to as structuralism, but it is really nothing more than a form of sensationalism. Titchener denies that there are "unpicturable meanings" of ideas. He himself, he says, always imaged meanings, even "meaning" itself. Here is his description of "meaning" as he images it: "I see meaning as the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop, which has bit of yellow above it (probably a part of the handle), and which is just digging into a dark mass of what appears to be plastic material." One of his subjects saw "meaning" as the "unrolling of a white scroll"; another saw it as "a horizontal line, with two short verticals at a little distance from the two ends." Here we have, if images are really ideas, three distinct individual meanings of "meaning"! These irrelevant images are now what we understand by "meaning"; "meaning," as any dictionary will disclose, is that which is signified by an idea or word and which is expressed in a definition, the comprehension or intention of a word or idea, and that is something very different from the images mentioned above. The egregious fallacy of the Cornell method consisted in the presupposition that ideas and images are identical; the subjects were instructed to look for images in their thought processes. They neglected "ideas" in the search for "images." Thus, one was told to look for the meaning of the sentence "Did you see him kill the man?" He reported that he had "No meaning all the way through." By "meaning" he meant "image." He had no "image," but he certainly understood the sense of the sentence; any child would understand that. If anything, such a report bears out the main contention of the Wurzburg School that images are only accessory products of the thinking process. It was the abuse of the introspective experimental method of the Cornell School that called forth a denunciation from John Watson and prepared the way for behaviorism as a school of psychological thought. Besides the Wurzburg School of experimental psychology, the psychology of Gestalt or configuration arose in opposition to sensationalism. There are really two Schools of Gestalt. The Old School originated with Franz Brentano, in 1874. He had been trained in scholastic philosophy, and he stressed the supra-sensuous character of thought. But it was the work of two of his students, Alexius Meinong and C. von Ehrenfels, who developed the ideas of Brentano into what is known as the Psychology of Gestalt. In particular, it was von Ehrenfels who showed that "configurational qualities" exist in many types of perceptions, so that we apprehend these complex perceptions as "wholes" rather than as mere "aggregates" of sensory impressions. Meinong came to the conclusion that in Gestalt, in many instances, meanings are involved which are more than the resultants of sensations and cannot be explained on the basis of sensation, because they are altogether objects of a higher order, namely, conceptual or intellectual. This view was, of course, diametrically opposed to the "atomistic" sensationalism prevalent in psychology at the time and practically amounted to a return to scholastic psychology, because over and above the sensory data of perception there must be the interpretative thought process as the configuring principle. Since Meinong taught at Gratz, the Old School of Gestalt psychology is often referred to as the School of Gratz. The New School is called the School of Berlin, because Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Koehler, who, together with Kurt Koffka, were mainly responsible for the new development of configurational psychology, taught at Berlin. These authors extended and deepened the researches begun by their predecessors of the Old School, especially by applying the experimental methods of modern psychology to the problem of configuration in perception. The New School began with an essay by Wertheimer on the perception of movement, written in 1912. Today Gestaltism is still receiving attention and has a large following. The final conclusion of the studies of the Gestaltists can be condensed into the statement: Perception is not the mere sum of individual "atomistic" sensations, but the resultant of the total sensory impression. Unfortunately, the School of Berlin opposed the intellectualism of the parent School of Gratz and attempts to explain all configuration on the basis of sensory perception, ignoring entirely the intellectual interpretation of the cognitive processes. The pathology of perception, such as in cases of cortical blindness and in persons operated on for cataract, reveals the fact that configurations may be "apprehended" and yet not "understood." Over and above perception, therefore, we have supra-sensuous thought processes dealing with intellectual meanings. The School of Berlin was still caught in the web of sensationalism, although it stood in opposition to the old-style sensationalism of Hume and his followers. Nevertheless, it was a step in the right direction. For three centuries the ill-fated ultra-dualism of Descartes has played havoc in the minds of philosophers. System after system has been devised, only to be found in the end to be inadequate. Slowly but steadily experimental psychology is
forcing philosophers and psychologists into
recognizing that man is not pure spirit nor pure
matter, but a unitary being composed of a material
body and of a sentient, intellectual mind, an
integral organism.
For a discussion of the classical realist,
peripatetic, and artistotelian-scholastic theory
regarding the origin of ideas, see Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book...
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