Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience/An Empirical Definition of Consciousness

by Wendell T. Bush

AN EMPIRICAL DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In beginning this final chapter I can but refer to certain recent articles which seek to improve our empirical accounts of perception and knowledge.^[1] My own effort is in the spirit of the writers I refer to, and especially have I felt encouraged by the articles of Professor James.

Professor James explains at the outset that he does not deny the existence of everything we may suitably call consciousness. The function of knowing is not to be denied, and for this function the name consciousness can be retained. He does deny the existence of any 'entity' or 'aboriginal stuff or quality of being contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made.'^[2]

Now, it is a merely verbal matter, but for my own present purpose I am going to call this function of knowing simply knowing or knowledge, and I am going to use the word consciousness to signify another fact or group of facts equally real. It is for the reader to decide whether my use is justified.

As creatures of habit we say that there are things and there is awareness of things, that there are objects and that there is consciousness of objects. Any fact to which I attend becomes straightway an object, and every object, we say, must have a subject. This subject can not be my body, for that is another object. The subject must be something far more subtile, namely, consciousness.

'Must be,' we say, not 'is.' The sincere empiricist may well be suspicious of *must-bes.' His first business is to see what the empirical situation contains, not what a definition implies. In what follows I try to report a strictly empirical content. leaviuLr (nit all 'must-bes.'

It sounds like an innocent and an intelligible proposition tu say that I see the chair on the other side of the room. If, however, I mean that an inspection of the situation as experienced reveals any detail of the content that can be called 'seeing' as distinct from the visual chair, and other objects in the shape of sensations of head, throat and body, this commonplace statement is false. The situation contains not seeing, but visual and other objects, and if I am interested in the object on the other side of the room in such a way as to make me oblivious of myself, the situation as just then experienced by me contains no seer.

It is easy to understand, however, why we say 'I see the chair' and think we have a feeling of doing something. Owing to acts of mine, the content is constantly changing, I am continually doing things in order that particular contents may exist, as when I travel and take great pains to see all the picture-galleries, or all the Gothic architecture, that I can. And when I at last have come to something that I have long and eagerly wished to see, there may be such a lively pleasure and such a sense of purpose fulfilled that I say to myself, 'Now you are beholding it, now you have really got the experience you have been longing for.' In these cases an empirical ego is present, but it is another object in the field of experience.

This sense of personal efficiency expresses itself in a sentence having its subject in the first person and a verb in the active voice and, in the example used, the visual object in the accusative case. And now applying this manner of words to the simple case of 'seeing* the chair, we get what seems to me a very bad piece of psychology. The situation may contain ego elements and non-ego elements, but these are all objects within the content; and anything like a sense of effort or strain which might be called a feeling of the act of perception is simply another object which would be grouped among the ego elements. But in most normal cases (introspection is an abnormal case) there is simply the presence of the thing 'perceived,' When I look up, there is the chair and that seems to be the whole story. The chair is there before me, but I can discover no consciousness of it. The sound of the electric car is out there in the street, but there is no consciousness of it. There is the odor from a lamp, but consciousness of the odor does not accompany it.

The field of experience contains objects of endless variety,—trees, buildings, sensations, pains, pleasures, hopes, fears, mathematical relations and logical necessities. But in no ease of knowledge does an empirical inspection discover the object plus consciousness of it. If we mean, then, by consciousness something observable over and above the brute fact that the object is there wherever it is, we certainly mean what no observation can discover.

It may strengthen this conviction to reflect that the idea of consciousness is probably, as Professor James says, 'the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing soul upon the air of philosophy.' We speak of states of consciousness; our psychologizing forefathers spoke of states of the soul and meant the same thing. We instinctively feel that consciousness is an inner thing rather than an outer one, and if now the tendencies pointed out by Professor James, and his own declarations mean that consciousness as a metaphysical concept is on the point of being dropped, and that with it goes the last bit of animism, does it not seem an unexpected verification of an important part of the theory of Avenarius? Avenarius calls the metaphysical idea of consciousness the last stage of animism,^[3] and says, 'am besten wärs man gäbe einen so verfänglichen Ausdruck ganz auf.'^[4] Naturally it is of particular interest to see whether consequences for idealism are likely to follow the new attitude toward consciousness.

And first, it does not seem to me that we should regard consciousness as a bad word. We can continue to use it to mean what we have really always meant by it, namely, what is essentially private to one observer. That there is a great mass of experience which is essentially private and is thus contrasted with what is public, is the basis of the familiar distinction between the inner and the outer world. Private objects are what we may intelligibly call subjective facts. For an object to be subjective is for it to be private. Now by any case of consciousness we mean what is equivalent to a mental state, and 'the fact that our mental states are incapable of observation by anybody but ourselves seems to be not an accidental, but an essential character of these mental states."^[5]

In adopting this criterion of privacy, I am glad to find myself in agreement with Professor Miinsterberg, who writes: "The most general condition which characterizes a psychical fact is that it can be experienced by only one, and that as object it stands to the subject in the relation of mere capacity to be experienced (Erfahrbarkeit); it is distinguished from physical facts by the circumstance that these can be experienced by more than one. . . ."^[6]

The privacy character is, I think, not really different from the one advanced by Dr. Perry in his article 'Conceptions and Misconceptions of Consciousness.' Dr. Perry describes cognitive experience precisely as I have done.^[7] The earlier judgment which is pronounced error by a later one, is thereby viewed as idiosyncrasy or confusion. Such rejected convictions are 'definitely recognized as my experience.'^[8] "There is no experience of which one may not come to say 'it is my state or it is your state."^[9] "The most unequivocal instance is the dream."^[10]

So long as we keep within the limits of the experience of one mind, this seems to me a very adequate account of the matter, but the judgments with which scientists as such are concerned are judgments in which they have a common interest, and in which validity means the support of corroborative agreement. In the case of the single mind, the earlier judgment loses validity as soon as it loses verification by subsequent judgments. The individual who can not obtain the assent of other observers finds his judgment classified as idiosyncrasy.

It seems to me a very misleading analysis which does not take into account the necessity of verification by other minds, at least, if we mean to be empirical, and if we are discussing that type of judgment which is a judgment in science. Now that cognitive experience which for itself is rational and full of insight, yet which a later judgment of the same mind, or a judgment of another mind, characterizes as whimsical, is what the criticizing mind can not get hold of and make its own. It remains the private experience of another, a mental state, a state of consciousness. The experience that is 'definitely recognized as my experience' and presents a 'for-me relation,' and is best illustrated by the case of a dream, is so manifestly characterized by its essential privacy and limitation to one observer, that Dr. Perry's excellent account can lose nothing by accepting privacy as the characteristic property of consciousness rather than idiosyncrasy and error, and idiosyncrasy appears naturally as privacy as soon as other minds are taken into account. And error, in science, is the fact of rejection by other observers. What is rejected is the decision of a cognitive experience, and it is rejected simply because it is not shared, for if it were shared it would be not rejected, but affirmed.

In what I said above about the great variety of objects and the universal absence of any type of object that can be called consciousness of them, I find myself in substantial agreement with Professor "Woodbridge,^[11] and I can not see that I really differ from him in proposing to use the word consciousness in a different sense. Professor Woodbridge expresses greater confidence in saying what consciousness is not than in saying what it is. It is not ' a kind of receptacle' into which things can get. It is not, as the idealist , the stuff and matter of all reality. But we can say that things exist in consciousness and express an intelligible and consistent meaning. When things exist in consciousness a new 'type of connection' is established between them. They are 'connected up in a new way.'^[12] " The peculiar way in which consciousness connects the objects in it is thus the way of knowledge actual or possible."^[13] "This peculiar form of connection . . . simply makes them known or knowable, and known with all their variety of distinctions from a thing to a thought."^[14] And there is 'apparently abundant right to conclude that when consciousness exists, a world hitherto unknown has become known.'^[15]

Now, I do not see why in the sentences I have quoted, the word knowledge or knowing or cognition could not be substituted for the word consciousness, and express even more clearly what is meant. Of course, in view of the fact that the article expresses a greater confidence in its negations than in its positive affirmations, I do not wish to interpret these with undue assurance, but the meaning, I take it, is that when consciousness occurs real objects become known, and the only difference it makes to the objects is that they are related in ways to which they themselves are indifferent, but which constitute knowledge. These relations are relations of mutual implication.

With all the negations of Professor Woodbridge I entirely agree, and I can not see that any of these suffer from substituting the word knowledge for the word consciousness. The question whether consciousness exists is simply the question whether these cognitive relations exist, and the suggestions of Professor Woodbridge toward a definition of consciousness really seem to me to have in view a definition of knowledge.

Professor Woodbridge recognizes as 'an important aspect of consciousness,' the 'isolation' of the 'individual consciousness.'^[16] It seems to me that he would simplify the statement of his own position and certainly admit nothing inconsistent with that position by accepting the criterion of privacy and isolation as giving the essential property of consciousness.

I shall, accordingly, use the word consciousness to mean experience that is essentially the private and unsharable experience of one person, and I shall conceive such experience, which for each one of us is a certain streaming of objects of the private tjT)e. as contrasted with objects that are public, and directly observable by any one so far as their own nature is concerned. This is the ordinary antithesis of subjective and objective, mind and nature, 'Bewusstsein and Natursein.^[17] We have the two kinds of objects; the distinction is commonplace, but strictly empirical.

Let us now see whether this return to the ungarbled facts of experience has any consequences for transcendental idealism. My purpose is precisely that of Dr. Perry in the article I have referred to, namely, to deal logically with the idealistic theory of an Absolute. The success of Dr. Perry's criticism depends, it seems to me, on the obligation which the idealist may be under to accept Dr, Perry's definition of consciousness. It does not seem to me that the idealist is obliged to accept this definition, but, as I have above remarked, all the intentions of this definition seem to me better carried out when we say that consciousness is private experience, and the idealist certainly would not deny that he conceives all objects as mental states and that these are, as such, essentially private and exclusive.

The word consciousness is so wrapped up with idealistic implications that it seems to me most desirable to get rid of the phrase 'objects exist in consciousness.' Consciousness is subjective, individual and private, and if we intend to give an accurate description of the empirical situation, it is wise to cease using phrases that have us ensnared before we know it in a metaphysical tradition. To come back to the chair, the actual test whether my visual object be chair or hallucination would be to find out whether you too see what I do. Meaning, then, by consciousness the kind of objects that are private and exclusive, there is no motive whatever for saying the chair exists 'in consciousness.' It exists in the room, in space, in time (although here I think we begin to use metaphors), it exists in the system of relations that constitutes knowledge of it.

From the point of view, then, of an accurate description of the empirical situation, I have no ground for claiming the chair as my private object, which it must be if it is a mental state or a case of consciousness. If the privacy of consciousness nowhere comes into play that identical chair can be your object and my object, by which we mean that you, I and the chair are all objects in one situation.

But if the above reasoning is sound, how fares it with the logic of idealism?

When the argument for idealism can be stated in so many ways it may seem futile perhaps to pick out one. The one I give is not the same as that quoted by Dr. Perry. I give the following argument because it has always seemed to me the best one, and because it is usually ignored by critics.

It begins by explaining that specific sense-qualities exist only by virtue of the functional activity of the perceiving subject, and that it is impossible to describe or conceive an object in other terms than those of consciousness, and that consequently to assume the existence of an object having other attributes is to assume nothing. And to assume that the object exists as consciousness is to define it as what is the private experience of one observer. When all experience and all objects of experience are defined as consciousness, no common object is possible. It is impossible that a father and a mother could refer to their child and each refer to the same object. Different selves are completely sundered existences.

Now this flies in the face of normal experience, but it is perfectly logical, granting the premises. The argument proceeds: different selves can not come together in any way or have any common objects. Two selves, therefore, can not occupy the same universe. And if we are to claim to live together at all in the same universe, this universe must be the total consciousness of one self, which integrates and absorbs all our various individual selves. My world and your world are the same because we are of it, and it is the consciousness of one self.

Now, since we do all the time claim to have objects in common, we appeal continually to a situation which, when examined, shows that every concrete human life is a fragment of an absolute consciousness.

To think of shattering such a work of art! It is like looting a temple. And yet, if the chair before me is not of the essentially private portion of experience, this grand and really spiritual fabric of the imagination dissolves away like the architecture of dreams. And then? Well, there is pure experience and the task of science is to describe it. What other kind of a world there could be except a world of pure experience I really can not imagine.

And here I apprehend disgust and disappointment. Is this idealism ashamed, or agnosticism skulking under a better name, or realism too timid to speak out? It is hard to answer; the 'radical empiricist' has learned something from each doctrine. I am not sure that the demand for existence distinguished from experience is an intelligible demand. But in saying that, I do not admit any flight to idealism or to any other of the traditional alternatives in metaphysics. My conviction, which, of course, I can not prove, is that metaphysics, in the sense hitherto most customary, has nearly finished its career. But there remains precisely the same kind of data, namely, experience characterized in one way or another, and the only legitimate method of dealing with it, namely, minute inspection by all available technique, and accurate description.

Footnotes

1. Professor William James in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., Nos. 18, 20, 21; Vol. II., No. 2. Professor Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, in the same journal, Vol. II., No. 5. Ralph Barton Perry, in The Psychological Review for July, 1904.
2. Journal of Phil., Psy. and Sci. Methods, Vol. I., p. 478.
3. 'M. Weltbegriff,' p. 106.
4. L. c, p. 132, note G7. Compare 'Kr. der R. Erf.,' I., p. viii and p. 22.
5. 'Royce,' Outlines of Psychology,' p. 4.
6. 'Grundzüge der Psychologie,' p. 202.
7. Psychological Review for July, 1904, pp. 285–67.
8. Dr. Perry's article, p. 284.
9. L. c, p. 289.
10. L. c, p. 287.
11. The Nature of Consciousnesg.' A paper read before the American Philosophical Association, December 29, 1904, and published in the Journal of Phil., Psy. and Sci. Methods, Vol. II., No. 5.
12. Journal of Phil., II., No. 5, p. 125
13. L. c, p. 122.
14. L. c, p. 122.
15. L. c, p. 125.
16. L. c, p. 121.
17. Münsterberg, ' Grundziige,' p. 204.