Consciousness and the Origin of Philosophy

Consciousness and the Origin of Philosophy

What causes philosophy—the subject—to exist? I shall argue that consciousness is what causes philosophy to exist, or rather consciousness-in-the-world. The consciousness-world nexus is the origin of philosophy. It isn’t the world by itself or consciousness by itself; it’s the situation of consciousness in the world, or the situation of the world in consciousness. It’s the relation between them. I will give two obvious examples: the mind-body problem and the problem of knowledge. In the mind-body problem, we seek to understand how the mind relates to the body: we know we have a mind (consciousness) and we know we have a body (part of the external world), but we can’t see how they are situated in relation to each other. In the case of knowledge, we seek to understand how our consciousness manages to know the world outside of it: how can this(consciousness) know that (the world)—how is the knowing relation to be understood? It’s all about the consciousness-world relation: we are looking for relational knowledge in seeking philosophical knowledge. That is the basic thesis. In order to obtain this knowledge, we will need to understand both consciousness and the world, but the motivation for that comes from the problematic relation in question. In the philosophy of perception, say, we want to know how perceiving consciousness relates to the world perceived: is the world seen directly or is the relation mediated? Hence: what is seeing and what is the thing seen? I know myself and I think I know the world; what I don’t know is how one relates to the other—that is opaque and not contained in the two separate pieces of knowledge. Put bluntly, I don’t know how I am related to it. It is the juxtaposition that puzzles me.[1]

This doesn’t sound like too daring a proposal; it might even sound truistic. But notice how it sets philosophy apart from other subjects. In the sciences we want to understand the world (reality) not our relation to it—the physical world, the biological world, the psychological world. We use our consciousness to do that, but we don’t mention it. The results of science are not a set of relational truths about consciousness and the world, and the method is not to scrutinize that relation. In science we focus on the world side of the relation (this includes psychological science). The same is true for history, economics, and English literature. In philosophy we focus on the relation because it is not clear—not conceptually or logically clear (we are not concerned here with empirical facts). The relation suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity—intelligibility. We can’t make senseof it. This meta-philosophy contrasts with the one standard in twentieth century philosophy, namely that philosophy arises from language, or the relation between language and the world. Either language is about the world but we don’t know how, so we need to get clear about meaning; or language is defective and misleads us about the world, so we need to correct it. So, language is the origin of philosophy: it exists because of language—not because of the world or the mind or their relation. Now it may be true that some linguistic puzzles lead to philosophical rumination, but au fond the problem lies deeper—in our grasp of the consciousness-world relation. We would be confronted by philosophical problems even if we had no language. The problems lie at the level of ontology not semantics. That, at any rate, is the view I am defending.

This proposal faces two kinds of objection, both serious. The first is that it implies that if there were no consciousness there would be no philosophy; the second is that it implies that if there were no world, only consciousness, there would be no philosophy. The second objection is easier to deal with: if we only had concepts of our own consciousness (per impossibile), we would lose the vast majority of philosophical problems and it is not clear what would remain; our conceptual scheme would be just too impoverished. Would we even have the concept of truth, let alone objectivity and subjectivity, self and other? How could we ask whether the will is free in an objective deterministic world, or how the mind is related to the body? We need concepts of the world if we are to formulate standard philosophical problems, not just concepts of consciousness.  The first question is tougher: is it really true that without consciousness philosophy is impossible? Couldn’t an intelligent being devoid of consciousness entertain philosophical questions? For many problems concern the world as it is in itself—necessity, existence, identity, causation, space, time, right and wrong, and so on. Couldn’t these problems be considered by an alien being that thinks only unconsciously and has no concept of consciousness? Such a being might have a language that has no conscious expression but can formulate philosophical problems about these things. This objection is not to be lightly dismissed, strange as it is, but I think it has an answer. The problems are only philosophical if they spring from an awareness of consciousness and its objects; they would not be our philosophical problems in the absence of consciousness. They would not trouble the alien intellect as our problems trouble ours. For they would not arise from a felt mismatch between how things consciously seem and how they are in themselves: their subjective appearance and their objective nature. Causation strikes us a certain way consciously, as manifesting necessity, but we are at a loss to find a counterpart for this in objective causal reality (constant conjunction etc.). Our hypothetical aliens would merely suppose that causation consists in constant conjunction, having no conscious impressionof causal necessity. If they had no conscious impression of existence, wouldn’t they take it to be unproblematically such-and-such (say, spatial occupation)—a question of science. It is existence as we experience it that forms the philosophical problem of existence.  If they had no consciousness of freedom, wouldn’t they just assume it was impossible?  The subject of philosophy as we know it would not exist, though some allied subject might. The general form of a philosophical problem is that consciousness makes it seem that such-and-such but reflection on reality seems not to confirm this. It consciously seems to us that right and wrong are simple moral categories yielding truths and falsehoods, but when we turn to the world it is hard to find anything to back this up—hence moral philosophy. Without consciousness the world is philosophically flat not philosophically taxing. Color seems like an external feature of things so far as consciousness is concerned, but when we reflect on the world it is hard to find a place for it. Space and time are not problematic for consciousness, but considered as real external things they fail to live up to what consciousness suggests (or unimaginably exceed it). To paraphrase Russell, consciousness contains the metaphysics of the Stone Age (right or wrong); the answer, he thought, was to discard that metaphysics. But that is none too easy a thing to do. It’s the clash between consciousness and the world that powers philosophy. Without consciousness philosophy as we know it does not exist. Thinking philosophically requires thinking of consciousness, and hence thinking consciously; not so science. Science can in principle be carried out by unconscious beings (“insentient intelligence”).[2]

The way to think of it is this: consciousness depicts the world in a certain way, but the world may have other ideas. We have thoughts about both and can appreciate tensions and disharmonies and outright disagreements. In this intersection philosophy arises—not from each alone, nor from language or science or dreams or politics or history. It arises from a certain cognitive predicament that distinguishes philosophy from other subjects. Thus, we get attempts to reduce the world to consciousness or to eliminate consciousness altogether or downplay it. There is a kind of competition at work here, and philosophy is the upshot. So, philosophy has deep, primitive roots, and yet is a sophisticated performance, requiring a specific cognitive structure on the part of the philosopher. It is not essentially a linguistic product. Even kids can do it. Every department of it demands an oscillation between mind and world, a consideration of both in tandem. The problem of perception is perhaps the most characteristic area of philosophy, because it expressly considers consciousness on the one hand and the external world on the other—and the problem is remarkably recalcitrant, almost defiant. What is the relation of perception, that most basic of consciousness-world relations? This is a quintessentially philosophical problem. But the same basic pattern runs through everything in philosophy: knowledge, action, realism and anti-realism, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophy of language and logic, phenomenology. We could describe philosophy succinctly as the study of conceptual problems of mind-world relations and not be too wide of the mark.[3]

[1] Exactly why that juxtaposition is so problematic is a further and difficult question; I won’t consider it here. It probably has something to do with evolution.

[2] Artificial intelligence, as it now exists, is incapable of properly philosophical thought, but it might be capable of scientific thought (unconsciously). There is no such thing as unconscious philosophy.

[3] It is a popular idea that philosophy is a kind of pre-science, but if what I say here is correct this is a misconception. Philosophy is distinctively concerned with conceptual problems of the consciousness-world nexus not with the world considered in itself (including the mind), so it isn’t doing the same kind of thing as science. It could be called the science of this nexus, but then it is not continuous with the other sciences. Also, when people say that philosophy is about conceptual problems, they omit to specify what kind of problem; the current proposal fills in that lacuna. At last, we have an answer to the question of what philosophy is—the conceptual study of mind-world relations. For example, meta-ethics is the conceptual study of the relation between ethical consciousness and ethical reality. Notice that this definition need not include everything that is traditionally taught in philosophy departments—that is another question.