FROM THE things, events, etc., called "physical" or "material," we now turn to
those called "psychical" or "mental." With regard to these, the same two
questions arise as did concerning the others. Stated here in their right
methodological order, they are: (1) Which events, processes, etc., are the ones
named "psychical" or "mental?" and (2) What characteristic does empirical
examination discover as peculiar to all of them?
1. Which occurrences are denominated "mental"
The answer to the first of those
two questions is that, originally and fundamentally, the events, processes, etc.
denoted by the terms "psychical" or "mental" are the inherently private ones
each person can, in himself and only in himself, attend to in the direct manner
which - whether felicitously or not - is called Introspection. "Mental" or
"psychological" events are thus, fundamentally, the immediate experiences,
familiar at first hand to each of us, of which the various species are called
"thoughts," "ideas," "desires," "emotions," "cravings," "moods," "sensations,"
"mental images," "volitions," and so on; or comprehensively, "states or modes of
consciousness."
What introspection discloses may to some extent be published by the person
concerned, but is never itself public. To publish the fact that at a given time
one's state of consciousness is of a certain kind consists in performing certain
perceptually public acts - vocal, graphic, gestural, facial, or other - that are
such as to cause the percipients of them to think of a state of consciousness of
that kind and to believe that the state of consciousness of the performer of
those acts is of that kind at the time. This is what, for example, utterance of
the words "I am anxious," or "I wonder where I parked my car," or "I remember
him," etc. ordinarily causes to occur in the person who hears them. But the utterer's state of consciousness, which such words symbolized, is never
itself public in the sense in which the sound of those words, or the written words, are
public. That state of consciousness is inherently private to the particular
person, of whose history alone it is an item - private in the sense that no other
person can examine it, whereas each person can examine his own states of
consciousness; can, for instance, compare directly the feeling he calls
"anxiety" with the feeling he calls "wonder," etc.
2. Introspection, Inspection, Intuition
In the case of
sensations, attention
directly to them - vs. to what they may be signs of or to what they may be caused
by - is termed by some writers Inspection rather than Introspection. Inspection in
this technical sense, then, no less than Introspection, is attention directly to
experiences that are inherently private; for, evidently, we cannot attend to
another person's sensations themselves, but only to his appearance or behavior.
Such knowledge as we have concerning his sensations results from our
automatically interpreting certain modes of his behavior as signs that, in given
situations, he- is experiencing sensations similar to, or as the case may be,
different from, those we are experiencing.
For example, we do not and cannot discover that another person is, say, color-blind
to red-green, by inspecting the sensations he has when he looks at grass and at
a poppy, and comparing them with the sensations we have when we look at the same
objects. We discover it by attending to his perceptually public behavior on such
occasions, by noticing that in certain ways it is consistently different from
our own on the same occasions, and by taking this as signifying that his color-sensations
correspondingly differ from ours.
For the direct kind of experience, whether attentive or inattentive, which when
attentive is called specifically Introspection, or by some writers in the
particular case of sensations, Inspection, a generic name is needed; but no such
generic name less cumbersome than "State of consciousness, as such" appears to
exist in ordinary language. I have therefore proposed for this elsewhere, in
default of a better, the name Intuition - defining Intuition as occurrence of
some state of consciousness, as such, i.e., as distinguished from what it may be
consciousness of, in the sense of may signify.
Intuition, then, may be attentive (clear) or inattentive (dispersed, dim;) and,
in so far as attentive, it is then inspective, or introspective, according as
the state of consciousness attended to is a sensation, or is other than a
sensation.
3. "Content" vs. "object" of consciousness
The second of the two questions
mentioned at the outset, namely, what internal character is peculiar to all the
events, processes, etc. that are intuitions as just defined, i.e., are "mental"
or "psychical," is more technical than the first. Fortunately, it does not need
to be gone into at any length for present purposes. I shall therefore say here,
without attempting to argue the point, only that in the case of the events,
processes, etc. in view and only in their case, existing consists solely in
being experienced and being experienced constitutes the whole of existing. That
is, in their case but only in their case, esse est percipi. This is the
peculiarity that differentiates them from all other things, events, or
processes. The term "Intuition" thus designates the experiencing of such an
experience - an intuition standing to the intuiting thereof in the same kind of
relation as, for example, a stroke being struck stands to the striking thereof
(not, to the object struck;) that is, in both cases equally, as the "connate" or
"internal" accusative of the activity concerned, as distinguished from the
"alien" or "objective" accusative of it. Similarly, compare tasting a taste with
tasting a substance, tasting bitter taste with tasting quinine, thinking a
thought with thinking of New York, etc.
Introspection, then, and likewise "Inspection," is intuition attentive
to its
own modality of the moment, instead of, as normally, inattentive to it. Its
particular modality at any moment I term the content of consciousness at the
moment, as distinguished from the object of consciousness at the moment.(1)
(1) The contentions and the terminological proposals sketched in this and the
preceding two sections are explicated and defended in detail in Chapts. 12, 13,
and 14 of my Nature, Mind, and Death Open Court Pub. Co. La Salle, Ill. 1951.
See in particular pp. 230-40, 275-80, 293-5, 302.
In connection with the above account of states of consciousness, it will be
appropriate to comment here briefly on the fact, of which much is being made
these days, that we all possess a vocabulary, understood by our fellows, for
mental states or states of consciousness. This, it is alleged, means that mental
states cannot, as generally has been assumed and as asserted in the text above,
be occurrences unobservable by other persons than the particular one in whom
they occur, i.e., be inherently private.
Rather, it is contended, the denotation of the words which denote mental states
must have been learned by us in the same manner as that of the words which
denote physical objects and events; namely, by our hearing them applied by other
persons to public occurrences which they and ourselves were witnessing - these,
however, being denominated specifically "mental" when they consisted of modes of
behavior of certain special kinds; e.g., anger-behavior, goal-seeking-behavior,
listening-behavior, seeing-behavior, etc.
A crucial fact, however, is overlooked by this would-be-inclusive behavioristic
account of the manner in which men have acquired a shared vocabulary for mental
states notwithstanding the latter's inherent privacy. That crucial fact is that
when the behavior, witnessed by another person, which moves him to employ one or
another of the "mental" words in characterizing it, is our own behavior - e.g.,
when he says to us: "Now, don't be so angry," or "Don't you
see that bird?" or
"What were you dreaming just before I woke you?" or "You are
wondering at my
appearance today," etc. - then the words italicized do not denote for us our
behavior, which the other person is attending to but we are not. Instead and
automatically, they denote for us in each case the mental state itself which we
are subjectively experiencing - feeling, intuiting, immediately apprehending - and
which, irrespective of how in particular it may be connected with our behavior
at the moment, is anyway not that behavior itself but something radically
different and inherently private. In English, "anger-behavior" denotes one
thing, which is public; and "anger" denotes another thing, which is publishable
but never itself public. It is only in Behaviorese - the doctrinaire language of
the creed of radical behaviorism - that "anger" denotes anger-behavior.
A recent widely discussed work, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, appears
largely based on its author's overlooking the crucial fact just mentioned. And
one contention in it of which much has been made, to wit, that there are no acts
of will or volitions, is based merely on failure to notice that although many
voluntary acts indeed are not caused by any act of will, nevertheless certain
other acts that are voluntary acts are in addition willed acts, i.e., are
initiated by deliberate volitions.
4. "Mental," derivatively vs. fundamentally
There now remains to point out
that, just as the expression "the material world" denotes not alone whatever
events, processes, things, etc. are or can be made perceptually public, but
also, derivatively, the imperceptible constituents of them; so likewise the
events, processes, etc. denominated "psychical" or "mental" include not only
those, such as mentioned above, that are introspectively or "inspectively"
scrutinizable, but also, derivatively, certain others which are not accessible
to "inspection" or introspection and are therefore termed "subconscious" or
"unconsciou" instead of "conscious."
These would comprise such items as the repressed wishes or impulses, the
forgotten emotional experiences, the complexes, censors, etc. which
psychoanalysts find themselves led to postulate as hidden constituents or
activities of the human mind, in order to account for some otherwise
inexplicable psychological peculiarities of some persons.
Such hidden constituents can sometimes be brought to consciousness under the
direction of the psychoanalyst; but the exploration of these normally
unintrospectable psychological factors is still in its infancy as compared with
the exploration of the atomic and sub-atomic levels of materiality. The mere
fact, however, now definitely known, that there are such things as unconscious,
i.e., at the time unintrospectable, psychological processes, is, when taken
together with even the limited knowledge of them so far obtained, of vast
importance for assessment of the significance of certain of the phenomena
alleged to constitute empirical evidence of survival of the personality after
death.
Moreover, although the terms "the unconscious," "the subconscious, - are
commonly employed in connection with the factors brought to light in therapeutic
psychoanalysis, nevertheless factors of the same kinds undoubtedly operate, but
ordinarily in a non-pathological manner, in all of us.
Unconscious also, of course, are various assumptions under which a particular
person happens to proceed, but which he does not realize he makes because he has
never formulated them and nothing in his experience has happened that would have
challenged their validity and thus made him conscious of them. Unconscious also
at a given time are all those of his memories which he is not then remembering,
and all those of his capacities or dispositions which he is not then exercising.
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