PART VI—
SCIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY

Preface to Part VI:
Science and Subjectivity

In this final part the emphasis is on the subject in his or her subjectivity. This is obviously what unites two aspects of the work of Bachelard; as a practitioner of the human sciences it is he himself who holds them in equilibrium, as subject and agent. Chapter 23 links this part to the previous one through its association with Bachelard, who as remarked in chapter 22 was sometimes called the "philosopher of surrealism"; it deals with a well-known movement of ideas in France whose connections were mainly literary, though the resources of the subject on which its particular form of awareness depended—the freedom of the imagination, the refusal of a priori limits, the spirit of adventure—seem to me to be just those required for creativity and understanding in the human sciences, including the philosophy of science itself. One detail here: the minor surrealist poet Chausson was invented by me, as was his book and the press that published it. I think that at the time this was a gesture in the direction of the surrealist game; there now seems less point in it, but the invented quotation remains apposite, and there would be even less point in rewriting it all than in leaving the artifice in place.

The subject is embodied: could this happen in any cases other than those of human beings or the higher animals? In chapter 24 I try out the hypothesis of an ascent from primitive sensitivity to full subjectivity, sketched in the previous chapter, in connection with an inquiry into that by now hoary issue of the possibility that machines might think. But I give a fresh turn, it seems to me (which means "I think," a point developed in the chapter), to the notion of thinking. In another paper as yet unpublished, destined for another encyclopedic work, this time

a French dictionary of poetics, I try a similar tack with the creation and judgment of works of art, with similar results: nothing that we know about thought, or subjectivity, or art, rules out the eventual performance by machines of appropriate, and as far as we can tell authentic, functions in these domains.

Chapters 25 and 26 represent the fullest development of the argument implied by the subtitle (and, in the case of the eponymous chapter 26, the main title) of the book: the dependence of science on, or its embodiment in, individual knowing subjects. The status of subjectivity has been a major philosophical problem since Kant and Kierkegaard, but it was the introduction of the concept of intentionality by Brentano, and its extension by Husserl, that made it possible to understand the world-making power of the subject. The issue is much misunderstood: the world the subject makes—or the world that is made for it by its powers of intentionality—is not the hypothesized real world, the physical universe, but the life-world, the one that is born with the individual and dies when he or she dies. This is belied for most people—and for many otherwise careful philosophers—by the vividness of the apparently stable features of the life-world, the objectivity of which seems to be confirmed by the agreement of others, so that we think of ourselves as inhabiting a perceptual world in common. However, other people are only encountered in one's own life-world; they, and all the apparently stable features of that world, have been constituted as objective by the adaptive strategy that uses intentionality to mediate the real world (as environment) to itself (as organism) in such a way as to ensure the survival of the species. Science itself can be thought of as part of that strategy.

Do I mean here a conscious evolutionary strategy? Do I mean "uses intentionality" in a purposive sense? Of course not, as some of the foregoing chapters will have made clear. But that is the way in which it is tempting to think, to a first approximation, as we try to make sense of the life-world, helped by features of it (such as language and other cultural objects) that we borrow or inherit from other people. Not even such objects guarantee a common world, because the mediation of the real world to itself, just referred to, need never—given the complexity of the systems involved—take the same form twice, at least not in a population as inconsiderable, relatively speaking, as the human population to date (only a tiny fraction of which partakes in any cultural sharing above the local and primitive).

The life-world is our only route of access to the real world—which can figure in it (to belabor a point, perhaps—but it is a delicate and crucial point) only as hypothetical . It is thus a paradoxical fact that while on the one hand my world occupies only a small corner of the

universe, the universe on the other hand occupies only a small corner of my world. I am a minuscule fragment of the hypothesized real world—but the hypothesis of the reality of that world is only occasionally the focus of my attention, which tends to be preempted by more mundane objects. The way in which I come to have that world is the main topic of chapter 25, and some of the ways in which this kind of conjecture has been adumbrated, especially in connection with the theory of perception, is the main topic of chapter 26. It will be seen that in the hypothetical real world I subscribe to an uncompromisingly causal theory of perception, but that in the life-world I find affinities with theories that appear to take a diametrically opposite view.

The life-world contains more than its perceptual contents—much more, though the perceptual will dominate if given the chance (which is one of the reasons why television is such a mixed blessing). Reflective and affective life in it—as contrasted with more straightforwardly active or reactive life—involves objects of an entirely different order: persons (as distinct from their embodiments), artworks (with a similar proviso), theories, theorems, narratives, personages, ideas, ideals, ideologies, societies, communities, nations, cultures. Does the fact that we do not require a realist hypothesis for these objects—that indeed we cannot propose one without metaphysical extravagance—mean that they cannot be treated by the methods of science? The final chapter of the book is devoted to the thesis that knowing subjects can sustain, with appropriate theoretical rigor, sciences not only of the natural world but also of the human world—sciences that will complement but need not imitate one another. (If the social sciences had not felt a need to imitate the natural sciences they would have made much greater progress.)

Whether knowledge is scientific—to hark back to the conclusion of chapter 18—is a question less of what is known than of how the knowing subject acquires and uses its knowledge, whether naively or reflectively, whether casually or systematically, whether as opinion or as judgment, whether as borrowed or as earned. At a time when knowledge of nature has so far outstripped knowledge of the human—as is evidenced by the enormous discrepancies that are manifest everywhere between technical power and social understanding—there is a greater need for serious work in the human sciences than ever before. And yet those sciences, as stable forms of knowledge, are in their infancy, as can be seen from the squabbles and recriminations of competing schools, among which the old-established analytic and the upstart deconstructionist are among the most notorious (even though their names, suitably unpacked, mean the same thing).

I would now be inclined to go even further than I do in the last

chapter as it was originally written, to point out that in the domain of the human sciences the temptation to fall back on a realist hypothesis has traditionally taken a theological form, and that the (relatively) stable world-views that have resulted, while comforting to their believers, spell eventual—perhaps imminent—disaster for humanity because they are incompatible with one another but cannot hope to resolve their differences, as the natural sciences naturally do, on the basis of a common underlying ontology. The convergence of the natural sciences over the brief span of historic time is an overwhelming fact, in spite of current pragmatist and relativist opinion to the contrary. It rests on a persistence of the real: this is the great background hypothesis, the refusal of which makes any collaborative activity, even that of relativists, unintelligible. The convergence of the human sciences, because of the very different nature of their objects, has to be constructed. This is an imperative that might well set the intellectual and political agenda for the next millennium.

23—
Science, Surrealism, and the Status of the Subject

My aim in this essay is to explore some conceptual relations between surrealism on the one hand and philosophy and science on the other. I shall not however be talking about particular scientific theories, or about the surrealists' reactions to them, but rather appealing (briefly and indirectly) to a possible scientific program. The common thread in this exploration will be the philosophical problem of the subject, which I shall treat first in the context of existentialism and phenomenology (in Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Husserl) and then from the point of view of a kind of evolutionary ontogeny. In undertaking this exploration I do not mean to reduce surrealism to the level of a theoretical view among others; if one talks about it at all one must at least acknowledge and respect the passionate difference of its founder, who after all once said, "For me everything is subject, nothing is object." I do however take it in its earliest form, as a movement of liberation through the power of the imagination, leaving aside the difficulties in which it became entangled when it moved from the level of individual or group embodiment to that of public and political involvement.

The problem of the subject is one of two chief limit-problems of philosophy. By a limit-problem I mean one that cannot be encompassed within philosophy but forces it to acknowledge its limits; if there is a solution to the problem it will not be a philosophical solution, and by parity of argument if only a philosophical solution is acceptable then the problem remains insoluble. The problem of the subject has this character because no problem can be posed except by a subject, and the subject cannot attain the exteriority with respect to itself that would be necessary to encompass the problem.

The other chief limit-problem of philosophy is the problem of the world as a whole. It is correlative to the problem of the subject and is problematic for a similar reason: no problem can be posed unless there is a world, and the subject as in the world cannot attain the exteriority with respect to the world that would be necessary to encompass it as a problem. In both cases the last gesture of philosophy can only be a pointing: it can as it were zero in on the place where subjectivity is likely to be found, draw its circumference, and point inwards; or it can reach through phenomena in the direction of transcendence, draw (but only approximately and partially—the boundary is both indeterminate and infinite) their periphery, and point outwards.

The first of these pointings is the encounter with existence, the second the encounter with being. Between them stretches the domain of objects, things, res , the reality of ordinary macroscopic everyday life, troubled neither by the absoluteness of being nor by the anguish of existence. The real world is a world in which people can live comfortably enough as long as they are not thrust up against what Jaspers already called Grenzsituationen , "limit situations," like love and pain and death. These are not without philosophical tractability, but elements of them reduce to our two main problems: love is the impossible encounter with another embodied subjectivity, pain the encounter of subjectivity with implacable objectivity, equally embodied, death the end of subjectivity because the end of its embodiment. That subjectivity should be embodied is the first observation on the way to locating it in the world.

But whose subjectivity is in question? It can only, for me, be mine. If I say "the subject" as if it were a category of thought, of metaphysics or ontology or epistemology, I hypostatize it as an object of my own thought and so precisely sacrifice its status as subject.

Objectively we consider only the matter at issue, subjectively we have regard to the subject and his subjectivity; and behold, precisely this subjectivity is the matter at issue. This must constantly be borne in mind, namely, that the subjective problem is not something about an objective issue, but is the subjectivity itself.^[1]

Kierkegaard remained in subjective despair over this problem, unable to make what he considered the necessary leap to something posited as objective, whether God or Regina or just everyday life, an outing to the Deer Park for example. For that, faith was required. Not that the ordinary realistic bourgeois was shut out from these things, church or marriage or outings to the Deer Park—but without faith, they would not be entering into them as subjective individuals. With faith, on the other hand, they would be indistinguishable from the ordinary bour-

geois, at least as far as external indicators were concerned. But Kierkegaard himself, unable to rise to faith, was at the same time unwilling to renounce his subjectivity.

Since Kierkegaard, up through the surrealists and the second (or Sartrean) wave of existentialism, the subject has been a constant preoccupation in Western thought, if sometimes a thorn in its flesh, to such an extent that even Sartre, and after him some of the structuralists, have tried in different ways to suppress it, by depersonalizing it or relegating it to "absence." Sartre had a horror of the "inner life" and went to a great deal of trouble, in The Transcendence of the Ego , to extirpate the subject from philosophy. I will not follow his whole argument but I cite from the conclusion of the book,

The subject-object duality, which is purely logical, [should] definitively disappear from philosophical preoccupations. The World has not created the me; the me has not created the World. These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, no longer has anything of the subject. It is no longer a collection of representations. It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute source of existence. And the relation of interdependence established by this absolute consciousness between the me and the World is sufficient for the me to appear as "endangered" before the World, for the me (indirectly and through the intermediary of states) to draw the whole of its content from the World.^[2]

But this "absolute consciousness" constitutes a far more difficult problem than the subject itself. Sartre's answer to the question of the origin of the subject is to have it emerge from a sort of prepersonal field of consciousness. He adopts this solution in order to avoid the charge of escapism that he levels against Husserl's doctrine of the transcendental ego, insisting that the ego must not take refuge from the world but be out in it, among things. Unfortunately this was just the point on which he most gravely misunderstood Husserl. Husserl inverted the subject-object relation (or the subject-world relation), so thoroughly that the transcendental ego, rather than being in retreat from the world, altogether contains it. "The Ego himself, who bears within him the world an accepted sense and who, in turn, is necessarily presupposed by this sense, is legitimately called transcendental."^[3]

This clearly allows the world of things, of reality, to continue in existence without me—only it is not my world, not the world that has sense for me. Husserl does not fall into Hegel's megalomaniac identification of subjectivity with the Absolute; when the latter says, as he does in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind , that "everything

depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well,"^[4] he does not mean the individual subject (the one I know because I am it) but a World-subject, thus personalizing and as it were subjectifying the dualism of Spinoza. Hegel, as Kierkegaard often remarks, has forgotten, in giving absolute reality to the System, that he is an individual subject.

The systematic Idea is the identity of subject and object, the unity of thought and being. Existence, on the other hand, is their separation. It does not by any means follow that existence is thoughtless; but it has brought about, and brings about, a separation between subject and object, thought and being. In the objective sense, thought is understood as being pure thought; this corresponds in an equally abstract-objective sense to its object, which object is therefore the thought itself, and the truth becomes the correspondence of thought with itself. This objective thought has no relation to the existing subject; and while we are always confronted with the difficult question of how the existing subject slips into this objectivity, where subjectivity is merely pure abstract subjectivity (which again is an objective determination, not signifying any existing human being), it is certain that the existing subjectivity tends more and more to evaporate. And finally, if it is possible for a human being to become anything of the sort, and the whole thing is not something of which at most he becomes aware through the imagination, he becomes the pure abstract conscious participation in and knowledge of this pure relationship between thought and being, this pure identity, aye, this tautology, because this being which is ascribed to the thinker does not signify that he is, but only that he is engaged in thinking.

The existing subject, on the other hand, is engaged in existing, which is indeed the case with every human being.^[5]

The problem is to give a sense to this "existing" which will do justice to the fact that the subject is a thinking subject, without absorbing it into thought taken as adequation to (or identity with) being. The couples subject/object, thought/being, are thought by a subject, in this case here and now by me, by you. And this necessitates the invasion of the perfect and eternal unity of the system by a new dimensionality that I have elsewhere called "orthogonality"^[6] and which I understand as the incursion of time into structure.

Sartre, who (as he himself later admitted) was only temporarily and perversely anti-Husserlian, introduces such a temporal dimension in an exceptionally brief and lucid text, "Intentionality: a Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology":

Imagine for a moment a connected series of bursts which tear us out of ourselves, which do not even allow to an "ourselves" the leisure of

composing ourselves behind them, but which instead throw us beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the plain earth, amidst things. Imagine us thus rejected and abandoned by our own nature in an indifferent, hostile and restive world—you will then grasp the profound meaning of the discovery which Husserl expresses in his famous phrase "All consciousness is consciousness of something." . . . Being, says Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. One must understand this "being-in" as movement. To be is to fly out into the world, to spring from the nothingness of the world and of consciousness in order suddenly to burst out as consciousness-in-the-world. When consciousness tries to recoup itself, to coincide with itself once and for all, closeted off all warm and cozy, it destroys itself. This necessity for consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself Husserl calls "intentionality."^[7]

The difficulty here is that, as Kierkegaard feared (but in a different way), the existing subject evaporates, this time as it were away from itself in the direction of the intentional object. "All consciousness is consciousness of something" requires perhaps to be complemented by the symmetrical claim, "All consciousness is somebody's consciousness," meaning by "somebody" a fully embodied existing individual, not an impersonal absolute springing out of nothingness. Sartre's idea of prepersonal consciousness seems to me merely mystifying. It is true that very great difficulties attend the question of how personal or individual consciousness emerges (I prefer "individual" to "personal" because it is precisely not a question of the "persona," the way the individual appears to others, but of biological individuality), but it is not helpful to invent a common source of subjectivity in "absolute consciousness." Whose is it? It is true also that when I become conscious of the world, but admittedly much later, it is not at first as an individual but as a consciousness. But it is I just the same; if I do not yet know who I am, it is not that I am confusing myself with someone else.

It seems to me in fact that the refusal of the idea of the subject, on the part of subjects, whether by Sartre or by the structuralists, is (like the refusal by Derrida of the idea of the book, in the introduction to a book) a red herring, unless indeed it should be a kind of surrealist game ("ceci n'est pas une pipe"). In any other spirit the utterance of the words "I am not a subject" would require elaborate preparation, like the utterance of the words "I am dead" in Poe's story about M. Waldemar. For the moment at least we are still ourselves subjects.

Even if everything I have said so far is provisionally acceptable there still remains the question of the nature and provenance of the subjects we are (or strictly speaking, as before, the question for each of us of "the subject I am"). I take this question up now from an entirely different point of view. To reflect on subjectivity is necessarily to engage in

autoreflection, to lend oneself to reflexivity. In the rhetoric of Quintilian there was a figure called subiectio , which was defined as "giving the answer to one's own question." In full subjectivity I give myself as the answer to my own question. But what kind of being must I be in order to be able to do that?

Perhaps some light could be thrown on this by a genetic approach, something like Condillac's device of the statue but without the prior assumption of interior organization. We might think in fact of several stages in which the interior-exterior relation takes progressively different forms. In the case of a merely material object there is no interior-exterior relation in the required sense. In the case of a very primitive but merely reactive organism there is such a relation but of the simplest kind—its interior state is required to match, in an objective sense, the exterior, and if this match fails it will move, essentially at random, until it finds a new and more closely matching exterior situation. In the case of an organism whose nervous system permits what we might call sensation there comes to be an interior representation of the exterior situation, and it is the matching of the interior state with this representation, rather than with the exterior situation directly, that determines its motion. A yet more complex organism which has a representation not only of the exterior situation but also of its own interior state might be said to have reached the stage of consciousness; its motion is now determined by the matching of the two representations. Its consciousness lies in the awareness of similarity and difference between these representations; but one might say that it is not aware of this awareness. Finally we arrive at what Sartre called the prereflexive cogito ; in this last stage subjectivity enters, a kind of conscious monitoring of consciousness that consists not in the matching of the two representations but rather in the matching of the interior state with a representation of itself.

This is of course sketchy and merely programmatic, but I think something like it must hold in principle. If we now ask the question, "What is the conscious organism's world like?" we get all sorts of interesting answers from biologists: specialized creatures have specialized worlds (in the case of frogs, for example, only what moves counts). On reflection it becomes clear that my world cannot be more complicated than the internal structure by means of which I represent it; the aspects of the exterior world that are not reflected or matched (i.e., anticipated) by this structure do not and cannot exist for me. What hides this truth from us is that we have, of all the animals, the most general-purpose structure, and the most complicated, so that it takes a serious effort of the imagination to comprehend it: ten million cells in the retina, ten billion in the brain, all multiply connected, and so on.

Now without pursuing this idea into its furthest physiological ramifications we can take one more plausible step and say that our interior world may be—and in fact must be—far more complicated than the external world in which we live. In order to match a given external situation I must have at my disposal a repertoire of interior representations that encompasses and surpasses—by far—the sum of the elements of the given situation. It is a bit like reading (and indeed is a kind of reading): if I am to be able to read a text I must know all the words it contains—and all the others in my language as well. This concept of the "prepared reader" is very far-reaching and I will not pursue it further for the moment. But I will point out that it easily explains, in its generalized form, the experiences of drug addicts who think they have come upon a new world; what they have come upon is a state, artificially displaced from the normal state, that would have corresponded to the world if the world had been different. If we are able to "read" the world in which we do in fact live, we must have the materials for reading many others, nearer to it or more remote (up to a point)—we must, that is to say, have the materials for the construction of the internal representations that are constitutive of states of consciousness other than the "normal" state, and these materials may be constructively employed, as we know they are, under special circumstances—sleep, illness, intoxication, etc.

In fact, the complexity of the apparatus at our disposal is such that "reality" pales in comparison with it. Not that in the first instance it takes precedence over reality; indeed, as Sartre suggests, a lot of what we are comes from the external world. The structure of the apparatus is determined, however, not only by the physiology of the nervous system and by experience in the usual sense of the word, but also and most strikingly by reading, and especially by the reading of texts. Furthermore, this is cumulative: reality is as it now is only now, but there remains in me something of what I read yesterday, last year, in childhood. Subjectivity, I will say, is what animates this complex structure, what scans it. The structure is idiosyncratic in each one of us, partly because of genetic differences, but mainly because of radical differences of experience and reading. And it is indefinitely extensible. If I pick up a book I have not previously read I borrow its structure, I lose myself in it, or as we sometimes say, I am "buried" in it. This is what André Breton clearly saw when he said, in Surrealism and Painting ,

Nothing prevents me, in this moment, from arresting my gaze on some illustration in a book—and lo! what was all about me no longer exists. In the place of what surrounded me there is now something else because,

for example, I participate without difficulties in an altogether different ceremony.^[8]

The reality, then, of "what is all about me" is for the most part much less interesting than the reality of what I read—or find in myself, in my unconscious, my dreams, in hypnagogic images or phrases. As a subject I have a whole domain to scan, if only I can find the keys to it. I also have deep resources of action, even violent action, which can be tapped in automatic writing or other exercises, such as shooting at random in the street. But where then am I? It is not that I inhabit my body, I am it insofar as I am a conscious subject. But I am it differently according to circumstances. Often I animate only its physical structure, or the borrowed structure of the immediate environment as it is delivered to me in perception. But I also animate other structures, borrowed or created, those of books or of the imagination itself. Let me cite Breton again, from the First Manifesto :

For today I think of a castle half of which is not necessarily in ruins; this castle belongs to me, I see it in a rural situation not far from Paris. . . . I will be convicted of poetic untruth: everyone will go about saying that I live in the rue Fontaine, and he won't swallow that. Parbleu! But this castle of which I do him the honors, is he sure that it is an image? If this palace existed, for all that! My guests are there to answer for it; their fancy is the luminous route that leads there. It is in truth at our fantasy that we live, when we are there .^[9]

Now we are always somewhere and we are always there morally, as it were, on the basis of what we are physically, even though this truth is for the most part hidden and may well remain so. There is enough going on in us for us to have no excuse for boredom. Among other things there are second-order activities like philosophy and criticism—including the question of the subject. If the subject, as I have suggested, scans or traverses the labyrinthine structure of the me, this means that it endures through time and traces out, so to speak, a line through this structure, through this network of available subjective states. To the idiosyncrasy of the subject we can then add its linearity, thus invoking the doctrine of the sign—unsurprisingly, perhaps, since we remember from Husserl that the ego, the subject, contains its world precisely as a "unity of sense." The concept of matching to which I referred earlier has since Saussure been a special mark of the sign, and that the life of the subject should be a life of significance is altogether appropriate. (I find the notion of a "life of significance" far more acceptable than that lure of bad theology and metaphysics, the "significance of life.") As the minor surrealist poet Denis Chausson points out in his

essay Les lumières coincidentes , "If the surrealist life has a single power, it is to be able to make of the highest significance whatever is presented to it, in whatever disorder, by the chance of the everyday."^[10]

One further step: we can add also to the idiosyncrasy and linearity of the subject what the latter, in its Saussurean context, inevitably suggests, namely, the arbitrariness of the subject. That these subjectivities should be associated with these bodies, in this place and at this moment, has no reason and no explanation. They are not only our means of access to this reality, they are this reality; they contain their world, as Husserl said they did. But that leads to the final question: what is the relation between the reality the subject contains and the "external" reality with which we began? As we have already said, the projection of a reality from the side of the subject, out of its resources of conscious and unconscious structure, may seem in the end far preferable to the usual entrapment in the ordinary. And yet it is perhaps unrealistic to try to use that as an escape route from reality. To quote Surrealism and Painting once more,

Everything I love [says Breton], everything I think and feel, inclines me to a particular philosophy of immanence according to which surreality would be contained in reality itself, and would be neither superior nor exterior to it. And vice versa, for the container would also be the contained.^[11]

The question is complicated, however, for reality seems to exercise an obscuring function. In his essay on the first Dali exhibition, in Point du jour , Breton suggests that what is thus obscured is of paramount importance and that it can be recovered by surrealistic strategies:

It remains to suppress, in an unquestionable fashion, both what oppresses us in the moral order and what "physically," as they say, prevents us from seeing clearly. If only, for example, we could get rid of these famous trees! and of the houses, and the volcanoes, and the empires. . . . The secret of surrealism resides in the fact that we are convinced that something is hidden behind them. Now we have only to examine the possible modes of the suppression of trees to perceive that only one among these modes is left to us, that in the end everything depends on our power of voluntary hallucination .^[12]

The language of this passage has a curious echo which takes us back to Kierkegaard. For what was traditionally recommended as a means of getting rid of volcanoes, or at any rate of moving mountains, was precisely faith, the goal for which Kierkegaard strove so continually and, according to his own account, so unsuccessfully. If we had faith, then the real and the surreal would indeed be interpenetrating, just as

Breton's earlier citation requires. Consider the Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling :

No heavenly glance or any other token of the incommensurable betrays him; if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the congregation. . . . Towards evening he walks home, his gait is as indefatigable as that of the postman. On his way he reflects that his wife has surely a special little warm dish prepared for him, e.g. a calf's head roasted, garnished with vegetables. . . . As it happens, he hasn't four pence to his name, and yet he fully and firmly believes that his wife has that dainty dish for him. . . . His wife hasn't it—strangely enough, it is quite the same to him. On the way he meets another man. They talk together for a moment. In the twinkling of an eye he erects a new building, he has at his disposition all the powers necessary for it.^[13]

Here is faith at work all right—and yet is it in the world? Are the container and the contained symmetrical? Has something not appeared behind the "physical" obstruction of reality? Kierkegaard remained ambiguous about this; he could not manage to be this humble Dane, the Knight of Faith who takes an outing to the sea shore or the Deer Park—did he really think it desirable? Precisely the same ambiguity, strikingly enough, is to be found in Breton. Consider the following passage, in which Nadja speaks:

"A game: Say something. Shut your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What are they like? They're in black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Come on, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? Well, me, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all sorts of stories. And not only pointless stories [de vaines histoires ]: it's even altogether like that I live."^[14]

And Breton adds a footnote: "Doesn't one touch here the extreme of surrealist aspiration, its strongest limit-idea?"

But he doesn't want to play—or he can't. Like Kierkegaard, who lamented his own inability to claim Regina, Breton in several places reproaches himself for not being up to the surrealist challenge, for not speaking to such-and-such a woman, for not allowing himself to drive blindfold with another woman who happened to be Nadja. Or rather in this latter case it is just an observation: "No need to add that I did not accede to this desire."^[15] Perhaps in the end—and the parallels are far from exhausted in this brief paper—the subject in surrealism as in phenomenology cannot let itself go wholly in the one direction or the other, to a solipsistic retreat or to a total surreality. Perhaps pure surrealism, like pure faith, is an unrealizable limit-idea. But as in the case of the subject itself, that limit-problem, the failure to reach (let alone to transcend) the limit does not, as it turns out, invalidate the enterprise.

24—
Subjectivity in the Machine

I—
Thinking and Subjectivity

In this paper I shall propose what I take to be a timely shift of attention from the question of whether a machine can think to the question of who, if anyone, a thinking machine is. But there is life in the old question yet, and one way of looking at it provides a bridge to the new question. This is the strategy of treating "to think" as deponent verb, and it opens up the whole issue of thinking as behavior versus thinking as experience.

Deponent verbs, which in Latin grammar were passive verbs with an active sense, were so called because their original passive sense had been "put aside," deposed as it were, in favor of the new active one. So they involved a history, the history of a transition from something that happened to people to something they did . If this can be traced within a living language it must have been very recent (though the whole history of language, indeed the whole of history, is recent in evolutionary terms). In the case of thinking such a transition does seem to have taken place—indeed, it is still incomplete, the passive sense being preserved in many locutions in current use: "it seems to me," "it occurs to me." We have dropped the archaic passive form "methinks," but it remains in the language as an archaic form; it was current only yesterday, as it were. And we can get a sense of what the transition means by trying it out on another form: take "it seems to me" and transform it into "I seem it to me." That is what "I think" in fact amounts to—from having thought contents occur whether we want them to or not, we move to a position of control, we choose what to

think, we "make up our minds" (consider the transition from the old form 'I have a mind to . . . ," or its current descendant "I've half a mind to . . . ," to "I've made up my mind to . . . ").

Thinking has an authentic etymological connection with seeming or appearing; what I do when I think is to bring something "before" me, in a sense yet to be specified—the expression that comes to mind (the passive position again!) is "before the mind's eye," whose usefulness as a metaphor is however limited because of the tendency of the visual to preempt the field of attention. I will return to this point. The main thing to notice here is that the shift from passive to active takes us from the object position to the subject position. And this is something that happens gradually, ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically, and that requires our participation. Being able to do it is what it means to be a subject in the active sense, to be an agent in the process of thinking rather than a patient. But doing it does not mean the end of thinking in the other sense.

The two possible ways of construing "thinking," then, are as a process that goes on, that happens to us, and as an activity undertaken, that we engage in. Only the latter involves subjectivity essentially. But just what do we understand by this "subjectivity"? And, since understanding and explanation are correlative in the philosophy of science, is there an explanation of subjectivity? To deal with these questions in order: by "subjectivity" in this paper I mean the condition of being a subject, or being in the subject position, in relation to objects known or acted upon—being situated, that is, at one pole of a vector of attention or intention, the pole characterized by noetic consciousness as opposed to the noematic contents of consciousness. I do not mean "subjectivity" to be contrasted with "objectivity" where the latter is used, as it sometimes is, to mean a commendable detachment from affective influences on judgment. If I am to preserve a scrupulous objectivity I cannot allow "subjective" factors to influence my conclusion, so it looks as if I have to keep something called "subjectivity" at bay. But I have to be a subject , hence to have subjectivity in the sense in which I use the term here, if I am to preserve or conclude anything, or know that anything has been preserved or concluded. Another way of putting this is to say that objective knowledge presupposes subjectivity because any knowledge does, knowledge being just such an intentional relation.

Can subjectivity in this sense be explained? There are two main ways of going about the business of explanation, which I will call working out (from an intuited center) and working up (from a postulated base); their paradigm cases are respectively phenomenological and hypothetico-deductive explanations. Ideally these processes meet in the full ex-

planation of a given object, process, or event. This shows not only how the entity in question fits into a causal network but also how we have access to it in experience. But a systematic difficulty arises in any attempt at an explanation of subjectivity: we must start with it in working out, but we can't get to it by working up. This is, again, for the obvious reason that even working up presupposes it: subjectivity is intentional, and because both the explanandum and the explanans are intentional objects it is required if they are to be evoked.

This is a crucial point. I use "intentional" here in Brentano and Husserl's sense, not in Dennett's sense,^[1] which, although it catches admirably how systems with Brentano-Husserl intentionality might behave (or how their behavior might be explained), it doesn't succeed in showing—and to do Dennett justice doesn't try to show—that a system the explanation of whose behavior requires the "intentional stance" needs to have intentionality in the Brentano-Husserl sense. Dennett doesn't think this matters, but I think it makes a tremendous difference. Intentionality is just the feature of subjectivity that directs its awareness towards objects (or is aware of its direction towards objects). "Intentions," in the sense of "purposes," are a familiar case of this, though they account for no more than a small fraction of intentional activity; attention, to which I shall return below, is a special case in which the object is presented (normally in perception), so that its constitution as what it is requires no active contribution from the subject.

Of course the only subjectivity presupposed in this way is my own. Its intentionalities, however, are what make my world and my project and make them meaningful. Or perhaps having a meaningful project in a meaningful world is just what it is to be a subject. Quintilian's definition of the rhetorical form subiectio , as "the suggesting of an answer to one's own question," suggests a possible definition of subjectivity: to be a subject is to be in a position to suggest oneself as the answer to one's own question. One of the things I think is myself. But I think myself differently from the way I think objects, and that is one of the difficulties in the way of a general explanation of subjectivity. Freud to the contrary notwithstanding, the subject can't be made an object; I can't give my own subjectivity as the answer to anyone else's question, nor can anyone else give theirs as the answer to mine. But if we can't produce subjectivity as an explanandum on the basis of an explanans we can perhaps at least locate it, and indicate the kinds of structure and experience that are concomitant with its occurrence.

We have no evidence at the moment of any cases of subjectivity other than our own, and (conjecturally) that of some of the higher mammals. All of them are associated with the advanced development of central nervous systems. But central nervous systems can become ex-

tremely complex without the emergence of subjectivity. What we find we want to say is that there cannot be subjectivity without the full activity of thinking, and that brings us back to the old question. The distinction between thought as process and thought as activity closely parallels the distinction between thought as behavior and thought as experience: any system can behave, whether conscious (or subjective—but the terms are not synonymous) or not, but only a conscious subject can have experience. (The "ex-" of experience," though in its origin a plain "ex-" like any other, shares with the "ex-" of "existence" the sense of a standing-out from something: ex-perience is a coming-out from a going-through, but there has to be some continuity, some substrate, for it to be cumulative.)

II—
Thinking as Behavior

"Thinking as behavior" is itself ambiguous. It has two senses, one relatively straightforward, the other at once more trivial and more profound. The straightforward sense construes the behavior associated with thinking as a behavioral output that is taken to result from thought. It helps in circumscribing the place of thought in the process if there has been an input which has triggered it by offering something to think about. So the paradigm case is the answer to a question, and the classical form of questioning is Turing's imitation game.^[2] A machine that plays the game proficiently, so that its "opponent" thinks it is a human being, has to be admitted to have been thinking, or at any rate doing something that, if a human being did it, would count as thinking.

Turing argued that there could be no reason to deny thought to the machine if it satisfied the test by which we attribute thought to human beings. Is the imitation game such a test? There is clearly something it tests: it is by his or her answers to my questions (or responses to my conversational moves—outright interrogation is not the norm of social intercourse) that I judge whether my interlocutor is awake, English-speaking, intelligent, knowledgeable, witty, thoughtful (which is only one mode of thinking), gifted at languages or mathematics, a compatriot, a fellow-enthusiast, a professional colleague, etc. Mostly of course I assume these things and am disappointed when he or she turns out to be inarticulate, slow-witted, or fraudulent.

The imitation game in fact seems to be less a test of thinking than of the membership of one's interlocutor in one or more of a number of linguistic communities, all the members of all of which are assumed to be capable of thought. But on reflection it does not seem obvious that

if a machine passes the test of admission to such a community, it necessarily follows that this assumption operates in its favor too. What does the assumption rest on? How do people learn the language of thought—not the "language of thought" in Fodor's sense but the ordinary language by which they refer to thought?

They precisely can't learn it by behavioral cues except in the trivial sense: furrowing brows, banging foreheads, etc. But the more profound implications of this sense—the behavioral concomitants of thought, rather than its behavioral consequences—are connected with the realization that sometimes it is just the absence of behavioral cues that indicates thinking. A child who disturbs an immobile and silent parent is rebuked for it—"Can't you see I'm thinking?"—may learn to be silent and immobile too at tricky junctures and may thereby learn to attend to something in itself that would not otherwise have been attended to.

An anecdotal example of the point at issue here was recently provided by a striking scene in a play called "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" Its main character was a hospital patient paralyzed from the neck down. At a climactic point in the play a judge, who had to decide whether to grant the patient's wish to be allowed to die and who was in perplexity about this decision, walked downstage and stood motionless for what was in dramatic terms a very long time, his hand to his chin, obviously deep in thought. It was understood that in this moment he was actively exercising his highest human capacities, his high judicial function; and yet in so doing he was as it were symbolically paralyzed. He wasn't doing anything that the patient couldn't do, and the spectator was led for a moment to reflect that if the highest mode of functioning as a human is compatible with immobility, then the patient's immobility was no bar to his functioning at the highest human level.

That wasn't how the play came out, but it serves my purpose by sharpening the question of what is going on while we are thinking, what attention to the process of thought reveals, and whether attending to it has anything essential to do with the process. It might turn out to be the case that we are thinking beings who happen to be able to observe some of our thinking processes consciously even though there is no need for us to do so, like passengers on a ship who are allowed to go up on the bridge and watch the captain and hear his commands, though the ship would sail on just the same if they stayed below. And it might turn out that machines can't do this, in which case they would be thinking all right but there still might not be anyone there. On the other hand it might turn out that our role on the bridge is as captain, forming an essential link in the causal chain of command. And if there were some

maneuvers that couldn't be done without the captain's intervention, and the machine managed those too, then we would have to ask what in it corresponded to the captain.

Before anyone raises the obvious objection to this metaphor I had better do so myself. It sounds like a homunculus theory, and even Descartes saw that that would not do. He uses much the same image: "I am not only residing in my body, as a pilot in his ship, but . . . I am intimately connected with it, and . . . something like a single whole is produced."^[3] So it is not a question of a part of me observing another part, but of my exercising a reflexive or self-referential capacity that may or may not be essential to the process of thought. This "essential" remains problematic though—it might turn out that the captain himself served a merely decorative function, and that the ship would sail smoothly on even if he stayed below.

III—
Attention and Intenttonality

Certainly there are functions of what we all recognize as thought that we can't attend to even if we try. If someone asks me for the product of six and seven and I say "forty-two," there is just no way in which I can catch any thought-content between the question and its answer. I can of course complicate things so as to provide one—six sevens is the same as three fourteens, which is three tens plus three fours, two-and-a-half of which will already make another ten, and so on. But that is only like climbing the steps at Lourdes on one's knees so as to draw attention to the process.

The concept of attention keeps cropping up and itself needs to be attended to. It makes a pair with intention and the contrast between them is instructive. This has something in common with the contrast between discovery and invention, in that we attend to what is already there but intend precisely what is not yet or is no longer there, or what never was or never could be there (golden mountains, round squares). It is the difference between finding something and creating it. Subjectivity, in the phenomenological sense, is as we have seen intentional by definition: every consciousness is a consciousness of something, and intentionality points along the axis from neoesis to noema. This pointing however is an activity of the knowing subject, which sustains the object of thought; it suggests that the subject is also agent . The standard cases of intentional objects, just referred to, don't we suppose present themselves; they need to be thought of . (Their claim to ontological status consists wholly in the fact that they are objects of thought.)

What if subjectivity were merely attentional ? Consciousness would

still have a content all right, but the question of agency wouldn't arise; we would have to assume that thought proceeded automatically and that the various contents of consciousness associated with it, including the feelings of deliberation, agency, etc., were just given, as we are normally convinced some of them really are (for example, hypnagogic images and phrases). This is in effect the position familiarly known as epiphenomenalism. If it is correct then there can't be any way of knowing whether there could be subjectivity in the machine, but on the other hand it won't matter much.

Epiphenomenalism is about as uninteresting, philosophically speaking, as strict determinism, since if either of them is correct, there's nothing we can do about it; in fact there's nothing we can do period—it all just happens. It may be philosophy, it may be sex, it may be pain, it may be madness—we're just along for the movie. Perhaps someone wrote the script for the movie, perhaps not, it makes no difference, we're strapped into our seats, no climbing out of this cave. And these views might in fact be correct (I know of no argument that can block that possibility in either case), but if so my conjecture that they are or aren't correct has no weight whatever: it's just something that got conjectured in my movie, I can take no credit for it, I 'm not in it. Possibly the machine is watching its movie. If it is, as I shall suggest in a minute, it may or may not be enjoying itself, and that might have implications for us as machine-builders—but not in an epiphenomenalist world; there there aren't any implications of anything for us, just movie-implications at best, as unreal as screen kisses or champagne.

Still once one thinks of it one has to admit that a lot of human experience is merely attentional. So the capacity for conscious attention might be an evolutionary dead-end, a freak of which we happen to be the complacent (or on reflection the astonished) beneficiaries. But it seems just as likely that it conferred some evolutionary advantage, that attention made intention possible. The attention-intention loop constitutes, one might say, a conscious version of the sensorimotor loop, and may indeed be inserted in it, although this is not necessary either to the success of some sensorimotor processes or to the meaningfulness of some intentional responses to attention.

IV—
Sensation and Consciousness

This way of putting it provides a clue as to the emergence of subjectivity out of mere consciousness. First we have peripheral reflex arcs, then sensorimotor coordination through the central nervous system: so

far no consciousness. Then the complexity of sensorimotor activity, its multidimensionality, its necessary swiftness, make it desirable to give the relevant inputs analog form as what we call the "senses," and to represent the state of the ambient world by mapping its features into a visual space into which the position of the body and of its parts can also be mapped. (More accurately, the independent development of such an analog representation makes greater complexity, speed, etc. of sensorimotor processes possible for the organisms that have it.) Visual awareness, let us suppose, is just this mapping. It has its attentional and its intentional aspects: the input is something that as we say "catches" our attention, the output is the directed reach, first of sight (we look rather than just noticing) and then of the appropriate muscular complex. The sum of sensory awarenesses and their derivatives will constitute the content of consciousness.

Any sensorimotor loop, it might be argued, involves representation or mapping of some kind: at the very least the visual (or auditory or olfactory or tactile) space from which the input arrives will map on to the motor space to which the output is directed. However we need our system of representation to recognize the mapping (and the spaces between which it holds) as such—otherwise it's just a bit of causal machinery. In more complex cases, when the loop doesn't put its signals straight through but engages some more complex neural structure, possibly involving time delays that make strategic computations possible, we may find what look to us like internal representations that map into both spaces, sensory and motor. But do they make the input and output spaces "look like" the same space to the organism in question? Is computation here also deliberation of a sort? No simple answer, it seems to me, can be given to these questions. In our case it is so, which suggests that something similar probably holds for other organisms of comparable complexity.

Once the analog representation is in place (let us call it the "sensorium"), the organism can do all sorts of interesting things with it, especially if a good memory is also available. But the development, from the immediate and vivid sensorium (largely preempted by perceptual contents, which when available tend to overwhelm competitors for attention—this explains why the library in which I am writing is quiet, and decorated in muted colors), of the intentional domain required for thinking and subjectivity, must have been long and slow. Once it had learned to attend to the contents of perception (selectively no doubt—at first to movement and change, for example, rather than to constant features), the organism could begin to attend to sensory contents remembered or abstracted from memory. Later on—and here is the transition to agency—it could intend them also (imagine, project, etc.). At

this stage there need be no actual sensorimotor involvement at all: hence the immobility of the thinker. This activity is by definition conscious, and there can be little doubt that many animals share it with us (dreaming dogs, for example). The question is, how much of the activity of thought necessarily goes on there , rather than going on elsewhere and being reported there, or not, as the case may be?

I am suggesting that some forms of complex sensorimotor coordination may have required the insertion of an attentional-intentional segment, that this may have been what made them possible. Or perhaps it is what made learning them possible. In this connection Schrödinger's conjectures as to the evolutionary role of consciousness are relevant. Schrödinger thought that consciousness had a phylogenetic function: "I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance: its knowing how is unconscious."^[4] But once we know how there seems to be nothing to prevent our programming complex coordinations into the machine without requiring it ever to be conscious; we could give it the appropriate transform between visual space and sensory space instead of making it establish the transform for itself, as seems to be the case with us (although even with us a lot of that seems to happen automatically—binocular vision, for example—only learned refinements requiring conscious monitoring).

V—
The Ascent to Subjectivity

It is tempting to try to establish a developmental sequence, an ascent from the inertia of matter to the reflexive consciousness of the subject. I offer here one possible account of such an ascent, in terms of states (S), representations (R), and an operator (~) which I shall call the "matching" operator. Matching, as I have explained elsewhere,^[5] is not a simple correspondence but has an active sense—among things that match are equal numbers and identical colors, but also left and right gloves, keys and locks, musical phrases and their repetitions or transpositions, bits of jigsaw puzzles and the spaces they fit into, and so on. Above all, in language the signifier matches the signified (indeed I consider matching to be the fundamental phenomenon of signification).

The stages of the ascent are represented as (a) through (f) in figure 1. The states are states of some individual entity, which at stage (c) and above is an organism. At stage (a) the entity is not differentiated from its environment, so that there is no sense to a contrast between internal and external states. At stage (b) there is differentiation but no metabolism, so that nothing about the environment matters to or affects the

Figure 1

entity. Metabolism is the minimum condition for the entity's functioning as an organism. At stage (c) and above, then, the external state S_e is the state of the immediate environment as it affects the organism , ignoring irrelevant conditions even though these might seem, from some other point of view, the most salient features of that environment.

Stage (c) itself represents a situation in which the organism reacts to something in its environment, salinity or temperature, for example, so that it moves in such a way as to bring its internal state S_i into equilibrium with the external state and then stops moving until either S_i or S_e changes with time, in which case movement recommences. The matching takes place across the boundary between the organism and the environment. But at stage (d) I postulate a causal process that forms within the organism a representation of the relevant state of the environment. There is obviously no need for the representation to resemble anything in the environment, as long as changes in the environment produce corresponding changes in the representation. Now the matching becomes internal to the organism, and a mismatch, which leads as before to motion until it is corrected, is no longer a transaction between organism and environment. I suppose that at this stage the organism is sensitive , and that the mismatch, constituting as it now does a state among others of the organism itself, is felt , perhaps in the limit as pain—indeed almost certainly as pain, since presumably the avoidance of gross mismatches is of evolutionary significance.

It has to be admitted that here (as at every point in the ascent) my

assertions are wholly conjectural, but of course just such conjectures, which if true would account for the conditions they are intended to explain, are the stuff of scientific discourse. At stage (e) I envisage a double representation, not only of the state of the environment but of the state of the organism that requires to be brought into equilibrium with it: the monitoring of the match between these representations I take to signal the emergence of conscious awareness, though this is still tied to immediate sensory contents. A centrally important special case at this and the subsequent stage will be the case in which the internal state represented by R (S_i ) is an element of memory ; the availability of large numbers of memory-states is part of what makes consciousness and subjectivity as complex as they are. Finally at stage (f) the dependence on momentary sensory inputs is overcome, and consciousness is free to attend to matchings of pairs of internal representations. This is the condition for subjectivity: consciousness can build up an internal history, can lead a life of its own independently of the external state of affairs, provided the latter does not obtrude in the form of representations on a lower level that demand attention because of painful disequilibria. The number of available internal states can, with time, grow very large, and the life of the subject be almost wholly internal.

VI—
The Place of the Subject

In speaking of "monitoring" or "attending to" matchings of representations there is a risk of misunderstanding that I would like to try to dispel, though since the corresponding form of understanding can at best be metaphorical, this may not be easy. My subjectivity is of course engaged in the writing of this text, as is the reader's in reading it; as we look at the representations of the hierarchical stages, for example, at (e)

the vector of our intentionalities is roughly orthogonal to the plane of the page—we attend to the postulated matching of two states but our own subjectivity is a third element in the situation. But in (e) and (f) I do not mean to suggest that the consciousness or the subjectivity of the organism is a third element alongside the two matched elements; on the contrary, it is their matching . In the perceptual case it will look to the organism as if there is only one state, and that external, perception being of objects in the environment. But all the organism has subjective access to is a representation of the external state, and all representations are internal; what is happening is that the internal representation

(not necessarily resembling the external state but determined by it and responsive to it) is being intended (or attended to) by the organism, which for the purposes of conscious action or reaction is as it were lining it up with, sighting it through, correlating it with, a representation of an internal state, a memory-state for example. All these images of comparison are unsatisfactory because they invoke two entities being manipulated by a third, whereas the subject subsists in the dynamic relation of the two.

The net result of the matching that produces the subject is the intending of objects, of a world. In an earlier text I defined the subject as "what permits the integral, continuous, and possibly repeated apprehension of the object, in the moment of this apprehension and abstracting from purely physiological conditions of perception . . . 'Integral' does not require a total integration of the object in itself . . . and 'continuous' does not require a very long time—but enough. . . . Continuity implies, one might say, a repetition from one moment to the next; the further possibility of the repetition of a whole episode of apprehension, the recognition of the same object after a more or less prolonged absence, implies the 'genidentity' of the subject as an individual and of its own point of view."^[6] So for the subject in the diagram the vector of intentionality lies along the line, in the plane of the page; at stage (e), the first at which talk of intentionality makes any sense, one can imagine its pointing from left to right, sighting the external world through its representation, as it were. In that case we might be tempted to locate the subject itself as a kind of virtual origin of intentionality somewhere to the left. But this would be misleading at best, and by the time we reach (f) the assignment a priori of such directionality makes little sense. In general we might suppose that the vector goes from signifier to signified, but in the ramified network of representations that exists at this level it may become problematic or meaningless to perpetuate that distinction.

The subject in other words is coincident with the matched elements. The somewhat elusive nature of this relationship was anticipated (in what may seem an unlikely quarter) by Jean-Paul Sartre in his doctrine of the "prereflexive cogito."^[7] Sartre's argument in effect was that if I am conscious of something, I am at the same time conscious of being conscious of it. So in the matching of representations I am aware of the matching as well as of what is represented and the form under which it is represented. This double awareness is I think an essential feature of subjectivity. (It can of course be more than double, since the structure of the prereflexive cogito lends itself to recursion, though in practice I suspect that there is a limit to the number of terms in the series that can be attended to at once, and that two terms—the first two—are the

norm.) Saying this however is of no help in explaining how subjectivity is possible. As I suggested at the beginning, I think that such an explanation is unavailable to us in principle. The fact of subjectivity is, in the strict sense, absolute: as a problem it does not admit of solution.

Note that in the ascent described above "representation" is in a somewhat similar situation to "intentionality" in the early part of the paper: a specification of the relation of representation might be drawn up, that would be met by cases in which subjectivity was present, but at the same time the fact that a case met the specification would be no guarantee whatever that subjectivity was in fact present. Indeed, such specifications have been drawn up, by Churchland, Pylyshyn, and others, and they turn out to be nothing more than sophisticated versions of mapping, just as Dennett's intentionality turned out to be a sophisticated version of explanation. It seems to me unlikely that we will understand represent ation in thought until we have understood present ation in perception—and then (perhaps) in thought too.

VII—
The Sensorium as Monitor

What exactly is "present to the mind" in thought? I come now to an even more conjectural part of my paper, which belongs to the higher reaches of the ascent, after all the stages hinted at above. Note, again, that we might go up an ascent like this one (e.g., one that mimicked it behaviorally, with delayed reactions that looked like "allowing time for thought") without activating the sensorium or having genuine cases of subjective presentation or representation. One reason for this is that an organism (or a machine) can have sensors without having a sensorium. The old Turing problem, this time a bit closer to realization, comes up implicitly in Valentino Braitenberg's genial menagerie of "vehicles."^[8] His second simplest vehicle—with two sensors and two motors—already exhibits "fear" or "aggression," depending on whether the sensor-motor connections are parallel or crossed over. This reinforces the view that there is more to thinking than meets the behavioral eye (or less: the immobile parent lost in thought may in fact be merely daydreaming), but again it's we who interpret the behavior as fearful or aggressive.

I will begin this further conjectural development by likening the sensorium to the display of a computer, a very fine-grained display with something on the order of 10⁷ pixels. The display can be used to map a visual field corresponding to perceived features of a world, but it can just as well be used for text. (Of course text can be and often is found in the perceived visual field, since reading and writing are the dominant

sensory and motor activities of organisms above a certain level of acculturation—note that "sensorimotor" would be inappropriate here since there is normally a wide separation, and an extremely complex correlation, if any, between the two activities.)

Text in the sensorium will consist of sound-images (in Saussure's sense) or visual images of letters, etc., and it will coexist there with other sensory elements, with complexes of which textual complexes may be matched, in the first instance just as Saussure says they are in his theory of the linguistic sign. These matchings, achieved by an ability that I have called "apposition,"^[9] might be stored—the mechanism of this storage is for my purposes a matter of indifference, although any attempt to realize this scheme would have to pay careful attention to it—in a memory capable of expansion, in such a way that the appearance of one element in the display might cause the other to be retrieved. The process of retrieval would not be conscious, since the display itself is the analogue of consciousness; the appropriate response would just appear in consciousness, as I suggested above that "forty-two" does when somebody asks for the product of six and seven. We will have to suppose a basic repertoire of possible computational moves to have been genetically installed in apparatus of which we are wholly unconscious.

It is admittedly far from clear just how the contents of the display are presented to consciousness. I mentioned earlier that the use of the sensorium for properly sensory presentation—presumably its earliest use—tends to overwhelm other more con ceptual options, to preempt the space of representation; its use for symbol or text manipulation seems to be secondary and derivative. The history of the familiar computer display, at any rate in its popularly accessible mode, offers an instructive parallel: originally everybody (apart from back-room boys with cathode ray tubes) thought of the display as normally providing visual representations, video images in fact, and only later did it become usual to use it as a monitor for computer operations. But in the case of the "display" in this model of mind it isn't necessarily the case that its contents are obviously sensory at all; they aren't necessarily images in the sense in which that term has been used, e.g., by Kosslyn.^[10] It seems plausible that only after the development of sensory awareness could conscious thought have emerged, but its intentional domain, though as it were derived from the sensorium, isn't properly speaking a sensorium (we might perhaps call the sensory-perceptual domain the primary sensorium, the intentional domain of thought the secondary sensorium, in order to preserve the sense of the suffix as a place where something is going on).

The reason why this display model is so appealing, given what we

now know about computers, is that in fact even the contents of the primary sensorium turn out to be computed rather than just given—perception is the outcome of a computational process, not the mere transmission of data but the construction of a world out of them. This "computational model" is still being argued, though it has been obvious enough for a long time to anyone familiar with the relevant physics and neurophysiology. It is a delicate problem to explicate, to be sure. Consider, for example, Schrödinger's remark at the beginning of the work already quoted: "The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goingson in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain."^[11] Here "world" needs to be disambiguated: the contents of my sensorium are my world, even though I take there to be a world that exists objectively on its own that I will call the world, whose local features I suppose help to determine my world. But the events in my brain are not in the "very world" whose perceptual apprehension they make possible.

The essential point, though—expressed succinctly by the English systems-theoretical eccentric Oliver Wells as: the brain computes the world—is that perception is a computational mechanism whose output to the display is the world we perceive, or in Wells's words, after a discussion of Gibson:

What we propose is that the visual system be considered as a computing device which computes from overlaps of . . . different scenes the stable, continuous, unbounded configuration of the room.—What we "see." Note that this can only be done when there is movement; the head has been turned, and optic information on the retinas has changed. Without this movement there could not be any computation. It is as in mathematics—the computation of an invariant under successive transformations.^[12]

It may be worth noting en passant that Cassirer had this idea of perception as invariance under transformation as early as 1938.^[13] In the generalized or secondary-sensorium case we may say similarly that thought is a computational mechanism whose output to the display is the world we apprehend, or grasp, or understand, in its structure and not merely in its appearances. Much of the input here, while carried by perception, will be purely textual or relational and thus transparent to its mode of embodiment—which is why the same thought content can be conveyed in different words, or different languages, or different symbolic modes.

If this model is plausible, if thought has available to it both display

and memory, both what Churchland^[14] has called "topographic maps" or "state spaces" (among which three-dimensional visual space is the most easily envisaged, although the spaces of higher dimensionality that he describes for other senses—which of course we won't apprehend as spaces in the same way—might well function similarly) and a storage mechanism that assigns addresses to items of structure as they are encoded (cross-connections between experiential items in different state spaces, for example, but also and mainly connections between such items and textual ones, or between textual items) then a great many puzzling facts about brain structure and memory might fall into place and some neurological pathologies be readily explained. The question about the consciousness of thought then transforms into the question of how much thinking goes on in the display and how much is hidden in circuits that draw on stored information, whether learned or innate.

VIII—
The Subject as Agent, The Machine as Subject

What we have to assume (if we are not to fall back into the epiphenomenalist position) is that there is an intentional agency capable, if not of summoning material from storage (although it probably does that too), at least of attending selectively to what happens to be in the display, whether it shows up there on the basis of sensory experience or emerges when sensory experience is to some degree suspended or shorted out (the immobile thinker again). This selective attention will evoke the appropriate connections and thus build intentional structures. Full subjectivity, I argue, requires a reflexive intentional structure that represents on the one hand the genidentity of the agent from his or her past to the present and from the present to at least a proximate future, and on the other the coherence of his or her sensory and textual embodiment (though there are methodological obstacles to the conclusiveness of any such argument). It also requires just such an agency of selection or evocation. Here I think we are going to need a whole new way of looking at action as "letting-happen," as well as a theory of the dynamics of action, with respect to which I find some interesting hints in what I take to be a new reading of Lacan's gloss on Freud's theory of the drive. However, that is another story; I will remark here only that when the computer is turned on it is on and stays on, whether or not one happens to be doing any computing, and in our case when it is off we're dead.

I argue also that the embodiment of subjectivity is transparent to its

structure, which means among other things that although so far there seem to be no cases of subjectivity otherwise embodied than in biologically developed "wetware," nothing we know as yet excludes the possibility that subjectivity might be embodied in hardware. The specific character of any system is presumably to be found in its structure, that is, the complex of relations that it embodies. In principle one might then suppose that the structure is indifferent to its physical embodiment. Thus, for example (at a more primitive level of complexity), the reaching and bearing functions of an artificial joint are in the limit behaviorally indistinguishable from those of its natural counterpart, so that the structure of the patient's behavior is unaffected when a natural element is replaced by a sufficiently sophisticated artificial one. This is what I mean when I say that the embodiment is transparent to the structure. We are thoroughly familiar with numbers of ancillary or corrective or prosthetic devices that are transparent in this way: automobiles and telephones have become just as transparent to the structure of purposive behavior as pockets or eyeglasses. The banality of the examples is significant. It reminds us that intentionality and purpose are everyday matters, not special states we have to work up to deliberately.

If a machine were to develop a reflexive intentional structure of the required kind (and I would want to specify some constraints: the structure is always double, the system of matchings is not, as in the case of language, initially arbitrary, and so on) there would be no reason to deny it subjectivity. However a number of difficult issues need to be surmounted before such a point can be reached. First, consciousness is a necessary precondition of subjectivity, so that the analogue of the interior display has to be provided for the machine. The monitor that we can see won't do, but nor will a monitor that the machine can see—what has to be provided is a way of its seeing, not the monitor, but what the monitor displays. So "interior display" here has to mean "display as seen from within." It is not clear that this condition can ever be known to be met, though we would have to admit that if it were (that is, if we built a machine like us in all relevant respects) there would be no reason to deny the machine the attribute of consciousness.

Second, the interior display has affective components in human beings which have been tuned by millennia of evolutionary selection to be neutral to perception and cognition within normal limits. If we were to make a machine complex enough to rise to consciousness we would have no guarantee that its first experience would not be one of intense pain; it ought therefore to be a matter of course to provide the machine with a mechanism for voluntary anesthesia if not suicide. Third (a point already made eloquently by Turing in 1950), we could not expect the machine to give evidence of subjectivity any earlier in its ontogenetic

development than human beings do—which I believe often to be never, but in any case hardly ever before the age of seven or eight, and that after intense socialization and acculturation.

And when all was said and done we would still be liable to Cartesian scepticism about the reality of the machine's subjective experience, even if it told us elaborate stories about that experience. But then we are liable to this scepticism about one another. And in the end we would have to grant it the same benefit of the doubt that we grant each other, and assume that at the origin of its first person utterances stood an intentionality and an agency. The answer to the question "Who is it?" is essentially: the intentional agent who says "I." But is there any reason to expect that we will understand the relation between this "I" and its embodiment any better in the case of the machine than in our own case?

Perhaps we should say: we will understand both, or neither. The problem is that our understanding anything involves our use of the mechanism of thought, our occupying the subjective standpoint. That is why I find something comical about doctrines like those of Lévi-Strauss and Foucault which claim to have dispensed with the subject (except, in Foucault's case, the subject in the sinister sense of being subjected to social and political forces), and why doctrines like eliminative materialism, for example in Churchland, strike me as perverse. I claim to be a materialist, but there isn't much about me that I want to eliminate, certainly not my feelings and appetites. In the case of eliminative materialism I want to ask: what is eliminated, and from where? If we can have a representation of thought without any elements of "folk psychology," well and good—except that thinking that representation, having it as the content of my intentional domain, brings in my subjectivity again. Churchland writes: "I gradually became comfortable in the idea that there really were quite general ways of representing cognitive activity that made no use of intentional idioms."^[15] One might ask—what does "comfortable" mean here? Doesn't it require elimination in its turn?—and then point out that a representation of cognitive activity which makes no use of intentional idioms makes use of intentionality just the same: that of the thinker, comfortable or otherwise, for whom it is a representation.

For what we are doing now, thinking about machines and about their thinking (and if thinking means computation, or just producing answers to any questions, computational or not, then machines have been doing it all along—that can't ever have been the problem), is all taking place in our individual sensoria, primary or secondary. The question is, could machines think in that way too? And the answer is, why not? Perhaps it will turn out that the structure of thought isn't transparent to its

embodiment, that there's something special and unreproducible (except by biological means) about wetware, but what evidence there could possibly be for such a view is far from clear. And there is something narcissistic in the thought that we are the only machines to have the experience of thinking as distinct from its behavioral manifestations. At all events I think there are likely to be, before too long perhaps, some machines that it would be morally prudent to treat as ends only, and never merely as means. Doing so at least is what it will take to make me feel comfortable. But that opens up a different argument.

25—
Rethinking Intentionality

In this essay I wish to float a conjecture that I think may have relevance to the debate about intentionality that has been conducted over the last couple of decades in an arena common to several domains whose interests have come to overlap in a striking way: phenomenology, semantics, artificial intelligence.^[1] In doing so I shall be suggesting that some other domains have overlapping interests with these and should be represented in the arena: structuralism, psychoanalysis, the philosophy of literature—though these seem as yet, and in their popular forms, philosophically peripheral. Part of my point is that, suitably reformulated, they have a significant contribution to make to the debate.

Let me begin with a small point from Stoic linguistics, and a solution it suggests to a problem in the philosophy of literature. I take the example from Seneca, via Benson Mates.^[2] To understand what is going on on the occasion of a given utterance, say, "Cato is walking," three distinct entities need to be invoked. First, there is the sound of the utterance itself: "Cato is walking." Second, there is Cato, who is walking or not—if he is walking the utterance is true; if not it is false. But then there is a third thing that is brought into being by the utterance as an object of attention, namely, Cato-walking , something that might now be called propositional content but which the early Stoics called the lekton : what is said or meant or picked out by the utterance.

Roughly speaking, in more contemporary terminology, these three correspond to the sign, its reference, and its sense. To say "sense," though, opens up a large domain of argument, particularly about what

Frege meant by Sinn , that I wish to avoid. I have found it useful in developing a theory of literature simply to retain the Greek term, partly because—given that in literature the focus is on utterances written and read, rather than spoken and heard—there is an instructive (and etymologically justified) connection between the reader and the sense of what is read, between lector and lekton , but partly because this move avoids entanglement with current controversies in semantics and frees us to attend to the status of the lekton from the reader's point of view . What is it exactly that is brought into being by the act of reading? Not the words, for they have been there on the page, or in memory, all along (I can't read a word unless I know it, generically at any rate); nor the thing referred to, which is there (or not) independently of my reading.

The reason why this question is especially interesting in connection with literature is that whenever there is obviously something actual to refer to, as so often in nonliterary contexts, considerations of reference tend to contaminate the lekton, so that its peculiar difficulties do not have to be confronted. It is tempting to think that no object of attention is "brought into being" when I read about the President, or the stock market—it is just that I am led to attend to those things themselves, indirectly and at a distance to be sure but not in such a way as to require any ontological mediation. If I'm present when Cato is walking, if he's present to me ("presence" just means "being-before," which is why it's a symmetrical relation), then I tend to think that it's his walking, then and there, that is picked out for attention by the utterance "Cato is walking." But it isn't, because taken simply as itself the (noncontextual) utterance has to pick out the same thing whether Cato is there or not. It's true that if we contextualize the utterance with some indexical particle: "Look! Cato is walking!" (he's been paralyzed; the evangelist has just said, "Rise up and walk!"), the urge to conflate lekton and referent becomes overwhelming. But still it ought to be resisted, not only because the utterance might still be false ("Just kidding," someone says; the evangelist moves on, crestfallen) but because, just as in the Saussurean theory of the sign, we need the lekton in order to know that Cato, walking, is the referent.^[3] I shall call this tendency of reference to blanket the lekton "the dominance of the referential."

When I read about Hamlet or Emma Bovary the matter is not quite so simple. They have, it is true, tenuous connections to a referential domain, historical in the one case, journalistic in the other—but we know there's more to Hamlet than the original Prince of Denmark, whereas in the straight referential case the surplus (let's hope) is in the other direction: there's more, that is, to the real President than the report of him in the news. And most of the time the characters in fiction

bear no more than an accidental resemblance to anybody, living or dead. The book I happen to be reading, these days, for reasons having nothing to do with this paper (the reading of which I've suspended in order to write the paper), is Molloy . I open it at random. "The truth is, conaesthetically speaking of course," writes Beckett, "I felt more or less the same as usual, that is to say, if I may give myself away, so terror-stricken that I was virtually bereft of feeling, not to say of consciousness, and drowned in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams, I give you my word."^[4] There's a powerful lekton here, but assigning reference in any straightforward way would be problematic.

If fictional objects and characters aren't sustained (or overwhelmed) by referential attachments to some objective world, what world, we may ask, do they inhabit? The kind of answer that often seems wanted to a question like this will involve some hypothetical or metaphysical domain—of Ausserseienden , of mental representations, of the imagination, etc. All this seems to me, the engaged reader, a very heavy way of dealing with the obvious, which is that they inhabit my world—for as long as I'm reading, or whenever I think back on what I read. My world is a fairly complicated place, and its elements do not lend themselves to neat categorization; it contains, at the moment, both the pad I'm writing on and the thoughts I think as I write, the ticking of the clock and the anxiety of the deadline. Lurking in the background are Molloy, Moran, and the rest, ready to take center stage again when I get back to my reading. Then they'll fill my world; indeed, it may seem for a time that I've moved into theirs—I may be wholly absent from my normal surroundings, "lost" or even "buried" in the book, as we sometimes suggestively say. But in fact I won't have gone anywhere, they'll have come to me: I'll read, and there they'll be. That's what the lekton is in the case of reading.

But how does reading produce the lekton—or the "megalekton," as one is tempted to call it in the literary case, the whole world of the text? Just in the way that seeing and hearing produce the perceptual world. It seems clear by now that language functions like a sensory medium, processed in the cortex much as sight and hearing are.^[5] The fact that it's normally conveyed by sight and hearing only means that the cortical pathways to the language-processing areas have to pass through the visual and auditory areas, but their destination is elsewhere (and probably not as sharply localized, since language in one form or another uses a good proportion of our working brain capacity). In deaf people using sign language these pathways traverse a different part of the visual cortex, dealing with body-sized movements rather than (or as well as) the fine surface discriminations required for reading, and don't get in-

volved with the auditory at all; in blind people they pass through tactile areas as well as auditory ones, etc.

So language presents a whole world, or a part of one if other sensory activity hasn't been blocked out or suspended (as it often is, locally at least, when we are engaged in linguistic activity). Sometimes that world appears with imaginative vividness, as if it were painted, and that's one of the oldest techniques of literature. A classic case is Homer's description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad ; such a visually evocative passage was known as an ekphrasis , a "telling-out." Later on ekphrasis came to be an academic exercise, describing paintings in words (when copies weren't easily come by), but the term still seems appropriate as referring just to those uses of language whose purpose is to present a visual thought-content. Coleridge, in Kubla Khan , says that if only he could manage it

with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard would see them there

—a line I emphasize because it expresses so well the ekphrastic utterance-lekton connection, taking music as metaphoric for poetry. (The question of the lekton for music proper, taking it now to be a kind of language in its own right, is a good test case for theories of intentionality.)

However, the "seeing" that hearers (or readers) do need not be like that done with the eye. Seeing is a common metaphor for all kinds of understanding; thought-contents can be brought before the mind (not "before the mind's eye"!) and metaphorically "seen" in ways other than the visual, indeed other than the sensory (in the narrow sense) altogether. One still might want, though (on the principle of language as a category of extended sense) to think of these thought-contents as located in a "sensorium"; that will be the space of the world language presents, and it will be as really my world as the more vivid perceptual sensorium. The relation between myself as subject and the contents of this world is of course that of intentionality: a stretching-out towards, and a holding-in, meanings derived respectively from Latin tendo and teneo , both referring back to Greek teino , one of the senses of which is "to hold out, present"; in the case of intentionality I hold out or present something to myself. Not exactly that I choose to do this (though within limits I can, when the potential furniture of the sensorium is rich enough), but it's obviously a capacity I'm naturally furnished with: not only can I direct attention selectively to perceptual

contents when they are present, but I can evoke them when they are absent, and can also attend to, and evoke, thought-contents of a nonperceptual nature, such as those presented by nonekphrastic language. These thought-contents, under certain conditions of definiteness in conception and description, can qualify as "intentional objects" in the sense of Brentano and Husserl. The lekton is a domain of intentional objects.

I have suggested elsewhere that the nonperceptual sensorium might be called a "secondary" sensorium,^[6] and it and its thought-contents certainly seem secondary, as do those of memory or evocation (no matter how skillful the ekphrasis), in comparison to the primary vividness of the bright outer world, of color and sound, that I inhabit when attending to the immediately perceptual. But this contrast may be misleading. In order to clarify that question it is necessary to examine the relation between the vivid content of perception and the pale content of thought, between the data of the five senses (especially that of sight) and those of the sixth, as we may as well denominate language. Hamlet and Emma Bovary, I said earlier, just inhabit my world, sometimes to the point of extinguishing the brightness of the primary sensorium, of whose details I become unaware. Of course I'm helped in achieving this abstraction by protecting myself against intense sensory inputs, which is why I'll read by moderate light, in a quiet comfortable place, decorated for preference in muted colors. Those are good conditions for thinking, too—and, as far as that goes, for sleeping, a fact that may prove relevant in the sequel.

It is, when one thinks of it, an extraordinary fact that literature, philosophy, mathematics, and so on can occupy the foreground of our attention, and its background too (the phone rings and I have to attend to primary matters, but I keep thinking about this argument), that indeed the contents of the secondary sensorium can dovetail with those of the primary, the lekton can coexist comfortably with the furniture of the everyday world. Of course I can tell the difference between them (not being able to do so is a pathology we'll come to in a minute), but so I can between different environments in either world. If I have Madame Bovary in my hand I'm in Yonville, or Rouen, if Hamlet , in Elsinore; if I have the menu in my hand I'm in the restaurant, if the telephone directory, in the office. In fact, as I suggested earlier, I live in one world, not many, though its aspect and its furniture change as I shift my body or my attention. I can distinguish in it, up to a point, what is perceptual from what is intentional (though there are problems here when what I perceive is laden with affect), but I'm not inclined to say that some of it, for example, is "mental" and some "physical,"

though this seems to be taken by many writers on intentionality as an unproblematic division.

Which is developmentally prior, perception or intentionality? This moves the argument into more speculative territory. The usual account would, I think, maintain that perception gives us a store of experience and that we learn, as we acquire this store (through the agency of memory), habits of attention, and eventually intentional capacities, that enable us to manipulate, as it were, its contents intelligently and in absentia (Chisholm, following William James, calls the problem of nonreferring intentionality—that is, the intending of nonexistent objects—"the problem of presence in absence"^[7] ). But how does this process get started? The old empiricist doctrine of memory and imagination as decayed or decaying sense doesn't do justice to the strength and interest of the intentional domain. Here I find matter for conjecture in some work on dreams, on the one hand Freudian, on the other embryological.

Freud, in "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,"^[8] likens the imaginative writer to a "dreamer in broad daylight," and remarks that daydreams are especially the province of children, who create worlds of their own in play, inventing places and playmates with creative resourcefulness and certitude. These worlds, as anyone who has observed children knows, are at least as real to them as the world of adult perception that will eventually have to be learned. They are, without question, intentional domains; sometimes they incorporate lekta from children's stories, sometimes elements from the perceptual world, but the activity of intending them seems far more persistent than can easily be accounted for by the hypothesis that intentional objects are learned after the pattern of perceptual ones. The process of instruction consists largely in getting the child's attention away from this domain, compelling it over time to yield to the insistence of the perceptual. Eventually the "normal" adult loses the ability to intend alternative worlds in this strong sense—except in dreams .

Freud himself suggests that waking life is the norm, governed by the reality principle, and that dreaming is in effect a form of psychosis.^[9] But in recent years it has been shown that unborn children in utero spend a great deal of time in REM sleep, which sleep studies in the last few decades have associated unequivocally with dreaming. A standard question, when people are told of this, is "What can they be dreaming about ?" It seems odd to say that fetuses are psychotic, the idea of psychosis being defined in relation to a postulated normality. This is the point at which I float the conjecture I promised at the beginning of the paper. It is that intentionality is one of the basic functions of the

human nervous system, that it develops independently of and prior to perception, that dreaming is a normal exercise of intentionality free of the constraints of perception, and that dreaming in utero is to be construed as the laying-down and rehearsal of the function of intentionality . A lemma to this conjecture is that once perception comes on line, as it were, postnatally (though there are anticipations of this also in utero ) it tends eventually to preempt the domain of attention and to become the norm for unreflective introspection.

This latter tendency might be called, in parallel with the dominance of the referential introduced above, "the dominance of the perceptual." But until it happens the Freudian order is reversed: dreaming is the norm and waking life the derivative state. It is plausible to assume that waking life has to be developmentally acquired, and some pathologies may be explainable as failures (or refusals) to manage this. If the chaos of images and voices, and even of actions, characteristic of dreaming were to carry over into daily activity they would produce a plausible imitation of some forms of autism or schizophrenia or mania, and it may be that that is just what is happening in those cases. Alfred Schutz characterizes the highest and most aware form of subjective involvement in the world as "wide-awakeness," citing Bergson's concept of a series of planes of interest in life, from dreaming at the lowest end of the scale to action at the highest, and the transition from infancy via childhood to adulthood might be construed as the gradual ascension of this scale.^[10]

The ability to intend a world, like the ability to speak a language, is, I am claiming, a competence genetically provided. Without it the child would never come to consciousness or subjectivity at all. (The subject is what is present to the objects it intends, that are present to it—as I remarked above, presence is a symmetrical relation. The subject-object relation is something that has to be brought into being, that comes into being at some stage of embryonic development; it might be thought of as emergent in a manner analogous to that of pair-creation in physics.) The normal world that is eventually lived (like the standard language that is eventually spoken) is determined by experience, in this case perceptual experience. The innate grammar permits the child to learn English or Japanese or Kwakiutl—which one depends on its linguistic environment; the innate categoreal structure permits it to learn space, time, and causality. (This echo of Kant is not accidental.)

There is of course a difference between the language case and the world case, and it is a strikingly instructive difference. Not all children have to learn the same language, but there is a sense in which they all have to learn the same world, namely, this one with its day and night,

its warm and cold, its times and distances and bodies—including their own bodies. (It is of course possible that different bodies might learn the world differently.) Yet as in the case of language it must have been possible to learn a different world, it would be astonishing from an evolutionary point of view if the mechanism of world-making had been adapted in detail only to this one. A general adaptation might be expected, yielding what we think of, often with satisfaction, as necessary truths, but there is a range of states more or less adequate to this world—and some psychoses might be explained, again, by the failure of possible intentional states, for a given subject, to coincide with any of them. I take it that it was the availability of these alternate states that persuaded some early drug users, who managed chemically to wrench the brain into producing a different world-configuration, that they had discovered a new reality.

These considerations suggest a reversal of the usual way of thinking about the relations between thought and perception. Rather than saying that thought is of a different nature from perception—while admitting as everyone does that some forms of thought, such as memory and imagination, have something in common with a diluted perception—I want to say that perception is an involuntary but very vivid form of thought, of just that form of thought we know in its attenuated form as imagination. Imagination isn't decayed sense; sense is intensified imagination, which is forced upon the subject once its body is thrust into the outer world, where it is no longer protected from the onslaught of light and sound, of heat and cold, of touch and movement.

I use "imagination" here to stand for the function of intentionality that produces images; that it is an intentional function was recognized by Sartre early on, soon after his exposure to phenomenology, and his account of it in L'imagination and L'imaginaire still seems to me worth attention even though it fails to work out a clear relationship precisely between perception and imagination. Sartre carries—and can't help carrying—the burden of the old belief that makes imagination on some level derivative from perception: the image is of the object, though indirectly, while perception is of it directly. If however we are to think of the intentional function that produces the image as preexisting its activation by perception then it will have to be possible for the subject to intend images it never perceived.

This takes us back to the dreaming babies. I have no doubt that once perception assumes its dominant role, the contents of the imagination come to consist largely of what has been taken in perceptually: the elements of the imagined centaur are indeed parts of the perceived man and the perceived horse. But that there may be imagined elements of a basic kind—geometrical shapes, or even some organic ones; colors;

forms of movement—that are independent of perception, and perhaps very generally shared by nascent consciousnesses the world over, is not an original conjecture: it corresponds to, and easily explains, some features of what Jungian psychologists have called archetypes, though I would wish to keep a careful distance from the weight that is placed on them in that tradition.

The supposition that, just as in the case of language, evolution may have selected for some disposition to construe experience in one way rather than another (and as in Chomsky's argument about the linguistic case it may be observed that the purely inductive learning of the spatiotemporal world would be an amazing feat for the first few months of life) does not require the postulation of anything as melodramatic as a "collective unconscious." Of course, "collective" is ambiguous here, and unobjectionable if all it means is unconscious structures we happen to have, individually and distributively, in common, because they are determined by a common genetic inheritance. Among the Jungians, however, it usually seems to mean a shared reservoir of some transindividual sort into which we all tap, and for this I can see no evidence, nor even a remotely plausible model.

Two questions pose themselves at this point, one as to the nature or mechanism of the intentional activity that begins in utero and is then largely taken over—commandeered, as it were—by perception, and the other as to the nature of the intending subject that originates at some point (when?) during fetal development and is presumably genidentical (if not simply identical) with the mature subject the individual becomes. I will content myself with a programmatic treatment of each in order to leave time at the end to return to the metaphilosophical point with which I began.

The best model for the required mechanism is I think the Freudian drive, especially as expounded by Lacan. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis , Lacan points out that for Freud, "the characteristic of the drive is to be a konstante Kraft , a constant force. He cannot conceive of it as a momentane Stosskraft [a momentary impulse]."^[11] "The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall."^[12] Later on he quotes Freud as saying, "As far as the object of the drive is concerned, let it be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a matter of total indifference."^[13] The drive is a tendency-towards of a wholly nonspecific kind; it is a tendency that seeks satisfaction (even dreams in utero may be wish-fulfillments!) but that seeks it nonspecifically—and furthermore will never find it. This frustration need not be rendered in melodramatic terms; it is not a tragedy—but it is enough to keep the drive going, for a whole life in fact.

For I take it that the intentionality is switched on, as it were, when the embryo begins to dream, is never switched off except by death (though it may be suspended in dreamless sleep). In one sense its final satisfaction may be death—that would certainly be an acceptable reading for Freud, a final acknowledgment of Thanatos. But while it remains on it is at the service of Eros—as a side-effect, one might almost say.

In casting about for a suitable image here I find two candidates, from the very early and very late industrial revolution. The late one would be of the central processing unit of a computer; it is what gets switched on at the beginning of the day (indeed it may be left on for the working life of the system), and it is at the service of whatever functions one may want the machine to perform. But I don't wish to reinforce a computer model of mind (computers as we know them can only be part of the story, though I don't doubt they are a part), and I prefer the earlier image, which would be of one of those huge factory steam engines of the sort that can still be seen in museums, which drove a single shaft from which every machine in the factory, by means of belts, derived its motive power. Everything the subject does is powered by what we may think of as the intentional drive, which directs it out and towards its objects, which may be engaged with more or less force according to the nature of the involvement, sleepy or wide-awake, normal or neurotic.

What of the subject itself? I have suggested that it may come into being after the manner of pair-creation, the sudden (or in this case perhaps gradual, like a developing image) emergence of a subject-object polarity defining an intentional vector. What thus comes into being at the subject pole is perhaps the hardest thing to specify in the whole of philosophy. It is surely already in some rudimentary form Dasein; it ventures forth as Existenz; yet it is a Nothingness at the heart of Being. It is the condition of experience and of meaning. One understands how tempting many philosophers have found it to suppose that, the conditions for its functioning having been produced organically, the subject itself arrives from some other order of being, spiritual perhaps, as an adventitious supplement to the organic—and at the same time how inexcusable it is to yield to that temptation on the available evidence.

I have myself tried some formulations of the nature of subjectivity, and the closest I have come to anything even minimally satisfactory is this: "Subjectivity is the animation of structure."^[14] Unfortunately this definition is not fully intelligible unless one has already begged the question, because "structure" has to be understood as a set of relations maintained intentionally in order to distinguish subjective from merely organic states, and intentionality presupposes subjectivity. But then there is in any case a systematic difficulty in the definition of subjectiv-

ity, regarded not as an inscription in the symbolic (as Lacan would have it—though for him the subject is a consequence of structure rather than its ground) but as an originating intentionality at the level of the real: namely, that any definition puts the definiendum along with the definiens in the object position, and that is the one place where subjectivity cannot be put. But then it can't be explained either, the same argument holding mutatis mutandis for the explanandum and explanans.

These limitations do not mean that we are left with nothing to say. If we can't objectify the subject we can distinguish between its proximate and remote, its focal and marginal, objects, and much of phenomenology devotes itself to these distinctions. We can also as it were zero in on its place, show where in the world it is likely to manifest itself. This has in all so far known cases proved to be somewhere between the sensory input and the motor output of a living organism having a developed nervous system. It isn't that we should go looking for subjectivity there; rather, we have already found it: in our own case, to which the other known cases all prove analogous. Knowledge of the complexity of the structures subjectivity animates in our own case can suggest what precursors of subjectivity, such as reactivity, sensitivity, purposiveness, might be sustained by intermediate cases of organic complexity, and I have attempted on several occasions to sketch in this way an ascent from the inert to the fully subjective.

In the end, though, subjectivity has to be lived. But this turns out to be tantamount to living objectivity, because of the pairing relationship already drawn attention to: no subject without object, be it merely intentional (and that, as I have maintained, is how subjectivity begins); no world without ego, no ego without world. The world subjectivity lives, the life-world, or in the case of a world borrowed from literature what I have called the megalekton, is as a known world the total noematic correlate of the subject's noetic activity. Is it the real world, though; is it a public world? These are questions that can only be raised and answered within it, and they will be answered in terms of whatever theory of the real, or the public, the subject who raises them has at its disposal. I do not say "at his or her disposal," not because I want to evade the issue of sexism but because I think that gender, along with every other determination of the subject, is part of its object domain—but if this is the case then, for example, my being a child or an adult, a plumber or a philosopher, is part of my object domain and does not characterize my subjectivity essentially.

We are back to the nonspecific drive: the subject pole is empty, at all events of any of the sorts of objectivity it is capable of intending, its intentionality is presuppositionless, and it remains what it is constantly and persistently over the term of its embodiment, from prenatal emer-

gence to final extinction in death, allowing only (as remarked earlier) for periodic suspension in dreamless sleep. Of course we could say, as Heraclitus did of the sun, that the subject is new every day, though it is hard to see what would be gained by this, since while we were at it we could say it was new every moment. What we might draw from this line of argument is the conclusion that subjectivity reliably emerges, at the appropriate level of wakefulness, whenever the conditions are right for it, which would make its initiation in utero unsurprising but would also mean that if just those conditions were ever realized in an artificial device it would acquire subjectivity too.

While I am confident of the correctness of the foregoing account, it does not, without further argument at least, settle the issues raised above, about realism, about the public nature of perceptual space, and so on, and while I think that there are better and worse positions on these questions, and that what I have been saying about subjectivity is relevant to them, I cannot pursue them further here. In any case, in discussing them, the whole contents of the participating subjects' object worlds, gender and all, acquired over their lifetimes—generalized versions of what Sartre would call their facticities—would come into play, and the idiosyncratic variety of these explain why philosophical arguments flourish and are not easily settled.

It was in fact because of this occlusion of argument by prejudice, inherited or acquired, that Husserl introduced the epoche and the technique of bracketing, and there is a sense in which all I may have done in this essay is to reinvent the transcendental ego. But I think that the features of drive and in particular of persistence that I have attributed to subjectivity take us at least marginally further than the transcendental ego, which I take to be momentary and positional. However, this "momentary" raises a problem about temporality that must be addressed if only glancingly. The persistence of the subject could just as well be interpreted as its timelessness, since the passage of time is one of the things it has to be able to intend. And this would explain the sense that many of us have of being "the same person" as we were when younger, even as a child. I once tried to catch the essence of this timelessness aphoristically: "Until the moment of death, everyone is immortal." I admit to having found this a comforting thought, however paradoxical.

In closing let me indicate a line of philosophical argumentation that would in my view be settled, in the sense of being closed off, if the foregoing considerations were to prevail, namely, the very attempt to deal with subjectivity, or intentionality, from an objective point of view, or indeed from any point of view other than that of the subject in question. Failure to see the futility of this is, I think, what vitiates a great

deal of the work I referred to at the beginning. The history of this futility goes back to Hegel, whose habit of forgetting that he was an existing individual so much amused Kierkegaard. But somehow Kierkegaard's point still manages to be overlooked. Of course there is a sense in which any discourse at all about subjectivity necessarily partakes of the objective, in that the language itself has this status; it belongs to the objective domain—to speak of "the relation between subject and object" is already to invoke a lekton in which the subject plays an apparently objective role, and it would seem suspiciously ad hoc to rule that just expressions involving it failed to pick out propositional content.

This difficulty however is not insurmountable: in self-reference I don't need an independent lekton to know that I am the referent. There can't be a case in which what is referred to (namely the subject) is absent, which would activate the distinction between sense and reference. By courtesy I can speak of your subjectivity, or of subjectivity in general, but that doesn't endow what is thus spoken of with objective status, in my world or in anyone's. If something other than unqualified subjectivity is said to be the carrier of intentionality, the relation spoken of may be complex and interesting but it won't manage to be intentionality in the sense in which I have been using the term. So when Chisholm speaks of intentionality as a property of mental phenomena,^[15] or Searle speaks of it as a property of mental states,^[16] they may succeed in evoking some relationship between different classes of phenomena or between mental states and other features of the world but they don't grasp what I mean by intentionality thereby. (Mental states don't intend—subjects intend; as to mental phenomena, the concept puzzles me, since I would have thought nothing could appear except to a mind—but that would take too long a digression.) Similarly, when Dennett looks at systems like us from an intentional stance he gets interesting explanatory results too but comes no closer than the others to what intentionality is for us as subjects.^[17]

Am I being impossibly exigent here? I don't think so. It isn't that subjects with genuine intentionality wouldn't exhibit just the relationships that Chisholm and Searle and Dennett specify; it's that they could exhibit all that and still not have genuine intentionality. This is a problem as old as Descartes and his robot animals, and I know no way of dealing with it except in the first person singular. Of course that only works for me, but I can invite you to engage in a parallel activity, and although I'll never know for sure whether it worked for you, you will. My concluding metaphilosophical remark, then, is that I find it odd that so many philosophers simply decline to work in the first person singular, even when the problems they are confronted with clearly require it.

Perhaps that is because they misconstrue the problems. When Quine says,

One may accept the Brentano thesis [of the irreducibility of intentional idioms] either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention,^[18]

and opts for the second alternative, I think he misconstrues the problem on two counts. One is that in spite of Brentano's couching of the problem in their terms, it isn't a matter of idioms but of insight; the other is that the whole question is begged ahead of time if what is envisaged is a science of intention. There can't be a science of intention because science presupposes intention. All I'm asking here is that this fact about intentionality be recognized. As I said earlier, it leaves most of the rest of philosophy intact, but puts it under a modality that can, I think, lead to new and exciting possibilities, and has indeed been doing so for some decades, for a century perhaps—but not yet enough.

26—
Yorick's World, or the Universe in a Single Skull

In what follows I shall explore a set of ideas formerly important in the history of philosophy—ideas that seem on the face of it quite implausible, as so many philosophical ideas do—to see whether in the light of recent developments in science they may not contain significant truths. The central idea, briefly put, is this: that when we look at the world it is not the case, as physicists are thought to claim, that light strikes the seen objects and is reflected into our eyes; on the contrary the seen objects are themselves the products, not the causes, of perception; they are in fact objects in a kind of private and extremely detailed 3-D movie that is playing inside our heads—quite literally inside our skulls. Hence the appeal to Yorick.

I need Yorick only for exemplary purposes, because his is the most obvious skull in the commonly available literature. While I am at it I should confess that there is another common point of reference that echoes in my title, namely Thomas Eakins's Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, one of his Schuylkill River paintings and an old favorite of mine. The connection started out merely as a bad pun, but like all good works of art this one lends itself to interpretation, and I will draw at least this much from it: that it represents an individual entrusting himself to an elegant bit of machinery. (For reasons that may become clear later on I want to block the Freudian reading that would have him afloat on the unconscious, or anything of that sort.)

Yorick appears in act 5, scene I of Hamlet—it is the gravedigger scene, and that too may seem appropriate, since as I go on I shall be unearthing philosophical skeletons some might think best left in peace.

Hamlet is with Horatio, the Stoic, who lacks philosophical imagination—everyone remembers the remark in act 1, scene 5: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But here Hamlet himself is in a thoroughly materialistic mood. It is not just that death is a social leveler, but that the dust it reduces us to persists, serving perhaps humbler functions in the end: Hamlet speculates that the noble dust of Alexander might be found, in the imagination, stopping a bung-hole. Alexander, like Yorick, was a material object, his skull was full of real physical stuff. What made him Alexander was not the stuff but its arrangement as Alexander. The stuff of which we are made is in fact just about as old as the universe (and some of it probably formed part of Alexander on its way from the Big Bang to the present day).

Two questions, then: how does the stuff we are made of have to be arranged in order for us to have the life we do in the world we know, to perceive, to act, to feel and so on? And when it returns to dust, how much of that world perishes with it? What dies with Yorick? This question can be put in another way: what required Yorick for its existence when he was alive? Or more precisely still, what depended for its being on Yorick's knowing it? To start with, everything private to him—the secrets, as we might say, that "died with him"; his own desires, his memories, his consciousness, his subjectivity. But then also his perspective on the world, his way of seeing, his associations—and his associations in another sense, the social entities of which he formed a part. Suppose he had had a passion for one of the scullery maids—the clown had been his rival for her affection; that is why he poured the Rhenish—suppose even that they were secretly married. Then the couple, the marriage, depended on him and came to an end with his death. Suppose he had been the last surviving member of the Danish Jesters' Association: then the Association died with him.

In fact it would not be unreasonable to say that what dies with Yorick is Yorick's world. This assumes a general distinction between the world as an objective totality, on the one hand, and particular people's worlds—yours, mine, Yorick's—as the total contents of our individual experiences, on the other. When I die my world will come to an end, but the world will, I take it, survive, or at any rate persist. I believe that it was there before I was born and that it will outlast me. Certainly the castle of Elsinore was still there after Yorick's death, and so was the state of Denmark, rot and all. But now let us raise the stakes a bit. Suppose all the Danskers, as Shakespeare calls them, had died? The castle would have survived them too, but how about the state of Denmark?

The direction of this bit of argument will by now be clear enough, so

I will skip several steps and propose a provisional conclusion: the social world, I shall say, is mind-dependent. There are two levels on which this proposition can be sustained, one of them involving a stronger claim than the other. It is possible to make a rough division of things in the world into objects of the social sciences and objects of the natural sciences by asking of each object whether or not human intentions were involved in its production. The weak claim is that social objects are mind-dependent in this sense, as having been brought about through human action, in which we can suppose that human intentions were at work (although it is not necessary to claim that any particular human intended any particular outcome, such as the arms race or inflation, since as Engels once remarked, "What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed").^[1] The stronger claim is that social objects are not only produced but also sustained by human intentions, and are therefore mind-dependent in the sense that if everyone's mind stopped sustaining them they would, as social objects, cease to exist.

It follows from this stronger claim that idealism is the appropriate philosophy for the social sciences, and it is about philosophical idealism that I now want to speak. The idealist everyone knows about is George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, who thought that the category of "material substance" in philosophy was just a mistake. John Locke had recently developed an empiricist philosophy that said that the qualities—shape, color, hardness, warmth, and so on—which make up things we know (and they do make them up, in the sense that having all the qualities of an object together can't be distinguished by us from having the object) inhere in material substance. When asked, however, what substance was, he quoted the story of the Indian who was asked what the earth rested on: it rested, he said, on the back of a great elephant, which rested on the back of a great tortoise, which rested on "something, he knew not what."^[2] Substance, said Locke, was something, but he knew not what. Berkeley got a good laugh out of this and brought some very sophisticated arguments to bear, one of which I want to spend a little time on.

Berkeley puts the argument in the mouth of Philonous, the mind-lover, who is trying to convince Hylas, the materialist, that his position is untenable. Philonous keeps pointing out that in order for us to perceive something it has to be perceptible, and he claims that we can't know that something is perceptible unless we actually perceive it. In order to perceive it we have to be there. I am obliged because of its notoriety to refer here to the lone tree that has so often fallen in the deserted forest, and to the noise it does or doesn't make. Berkeley would have thought that a silly question: if the tree is there, of course

it makes a noise—but it isn't, unless someone is watching it or listening. Berkeley thought, as he believed (correctly, it seems to me) good Christians were obliged to think, that God automatically looked after falling trees as well as falling sparrows; and if God omnipotently holds qualities together in objects we don't need to call on material substance for that service. Two of the three really good philosophical limericks I know—by Ronald Knox and "Anon," respectively—together sum up this side of Berkeley's views (we will get to another side later):

There once was a man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
When he sees that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad—
And that's why the tree
Continues to be
Since observed by, yours faithfully, God."

I hope I may be forgiven all this familiar stuff—we are on the way to more serious matters.

During the course of the argument between Hylas and Philonous, Philonous makes an offer and Hylas thinks he has given the whole game away. Philonous says, in effect, "If you can conceive of a tree existing without [i.e., outside] the mind, I'll give up." Hylas says gleefully, "Nothing easier—I do now conceive a tree existing after that manner." "Hold!" says Philonous, "Haven't you forgotten your own mind?" "Oh bother," says Hylas, "what a silly mistake—I thought of this tree all by itself but of course it was I who was thinking about it the whole time," and so on.^[3] Now a brief consideration of Philonous's formulation: "conceive of a tree existing without the mind," shows that Hylas gives in too easily. Construe this as "conceive of a tree existing / without the mind," and we have to admit that one can't conceive of anything , existing or not, without a mind; but construe it as "conceive of/ a tree existing without the mind," and it is clear that some of the things one can conceive of with the mind can themselves, as so conceived, quite well be "without" any mind at all.

If we can conceive of a tree in a mindless world idealism fails, at least where trees are concerned. And I think we can conceive of trees, and oceans, and planets, and Big Bangs, and all the apparatus of physical existence, as existing without minds. We can, in other words, conceive of a world without us. But could we conceive of a joke in a

mindless world? or a purchase? or an argument? or a friendship? Or even a book (as something read) or a meal (as something enjoyed) or a war (as something suffered) or a nation (as something governed or defended)? The implied answer to these questions, at least as far as the social world is concerned, is: All these things depend on our knowing them; if there were no one to know them, they wouldn't exist.

Now I might leave the matter there, but the perversity of the profession drives me on. I said just now that we could conceive of a tree in a mindless world, could conceive of a world in which we didn't exist. But what would that tree and that world be like? I am tempted to say, what would they look like? but the mistake in that would be too obvious. If we replace "conceive" by "perceive" in our text no tricks of segmentation will help; we can't conceive of anything's being perceived in a mindless world, so the tree we conceive there can't be a perceived tree. But all the trees we've actually been acquainted with have been perceived ones. How shall we proceed with the argument? Well, it might help to look at what some philosophers have thought about perception, and particularly about the paradigm case of perception that we call vision.

The standard scientific account of vision is that light is reflected from surfaces, strikes the eye, is refracted and focused, activates the rods and cones of the retina, and produces nervous impulses that somehow translate into the experience of sight. It is important for my present purposes to realize that most of that account is very recent. A few hundred years ago nobody understood even reflection in any detail at all, and as to rods and cones and nervous impulses, they were as yet unthought of in anything like their present form. Still, people had theories of vision, often quite elaborate ones. Given the available evidence, some of these theories amounted to pure genius, and we have to admit that their proponents were at least as intelligent as the best of us and a good deal more imaginative. It is often instructive to try to think oneself into the frame of mind of some earlier philosopher, and sometimes the enlightenment that comes from that exercise is genuine.

The perception-as-movie notion in fact goes back at least as far as Plato, so I will begin this part of the argument with something familiar again, his doctrine of the cave (fig. 2). In Plato this is just an image, although he really does believe that the reality of things belongs to a world other than the world of appearance in which we live. He describes this cinematic space in Book VII of the Republic in these terms:

Behold! human beings living in an underground den . . . here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the

Figure 2

chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which the marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? . . . And of the objects which are being carried . . . they [the prisoners] would see only the shadows? . . . And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.^[4]

Figure 3

If in doubt about my description of the cave as a cinema, look carefully for a moment at the relations between the fire, the prisoners, the original objects, and their shadows in figure 2, and compare them with the same relations in figure 3.

Now all this is external to the prisoners, and there are many of them in the same cave. Let me now invoke the third-century Neoplatonist Plotinus, who changes the situation a bit and makes it into a serious theory of perception, not just an allegory. Plotinus is about as far from a causal theory, in which existing things cause us to see them, as it is possible to get; in his view, on the contrary, we help to cause them to exist. His world is as it were turned inside out: we think that what we see is the outer surface of material things; he thinks it is the inner surface of a world of light. You will get some idea of this inversion if you think metaphorically of turning on the light in a room, as we normally conceive of it and as Plotinus might. We think the room is already there and that the light just bounces off the walls. Plotinus might say that the light creates the room, blowing it up, as it were, from the lamp as an infinitely thin balloon that assumes exactly the room's shape, bulging inwards where the furniture is, perhaps poking out into the hall if the door is open. The difficulty with this metaphor is how we get into the room. Plotinus's answer is to turn us into the lamp: instead of having the projector make images and the prisoners look at them, the projector projects through the eyes of the prisoners. Figure 4 is an attempt to picture Plotinus's system.

Figure 4

In Plotinus Plato's Idea of the Good has become a single self-generating and sustaining entity, which he calls The One. The One is perfect, so full of perfection indeed that it overflows, emanating Being in all directions. I cannot do better than cite from The Enneads of Plotinus a series of brief quotations that give the essentials of the theory:

Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new; this product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle. Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual Principles. . . .^[5]

Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of light that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive body within range. . . .^[6]

. . . the All-Soul [has] produced a Cosmos, while the particular souls simply administer some one part of it. . . .^[7]

. . . so far as the universe extends, there soul is. . . .^[8]

. . . the Soul's operation is not similarly motionless; its image is generated from its movement. It takes fullness by looking to its source; but it generates its image by adopting another, a downward, movement. This image of Soul is Sense and Nature.^[9]

Matter, for Plotinus, is as good as nonexistent. In the words of his translator, Stephen McKenna:

Matter is the last, lowest, and least emanation of the creative power of the All-Soul, or rather it is a little lower than that even: it is, to speak roughly, the point at which the creative or generative power comes to a halt; it is the Ultimate Possible, it is almost Non-Being; it would be NonBeing except that Absolute Non-Being is non-existent, impossible in a world emanating from the bounty of Being: often no doubt it is called Non-Being but this is not in strict definition but as a convenient expression of its utter, all-but-infinite remoteness from the Authentic-Existence to which, in the long line of descent, it owes its origin.^[10]

Particular bits of matter, for instance, are under the administration. whenever attention is being paid to them, of the particular souls who see them, who participate in their emanation from the One via the Intellectual-Principle and the All-Soul; in this particular case, us. Nature and everything in it is, as we have just learned, "the image of the soul." The words of Plotinus rendered by this summary formula would be done better justice, I think, if instead of reading, "Nature is the image of the soul," we were to read, "Nature is an appearance belonging to the soul." The soul to whom my appearances belong, or in whose charge they are, is of course my own—this is an individual and not a collective matter, even if we all draw our emanations in the end from the same source.

In what follows, I want to hang on as well as I can to this Plotinian view. It has a kind of crazy plausibility; the attempt to see the surfaces of things as the screens on which our own projections terminate is quite feasible, as it turns out, and a fine challenge to the intellectual imagination. Why did Plotinus need such a bizarre doctrine? Why couldn't he have accepted the notion that light is reflected from objects, etc.? But do we realize, I wonder, just how bizarre that doctrine, in its turn, really is? What physics asks us to believe is that space is full of trillions upon trillions of photons, shooting this way and that at the

speed of light (which is their speed), in such prodigious numbers that wherever I put the pupil of my eye, however dim the illumination may be, enough of them are coming from every direction to that very point for me to see what is there if I turn my eye in that direction, all this happening so fast that statistical fluctuations are flattened out and I see things steadily. Such an account would no doubt have seemed to Plotinus to require a simply inconceivable prodigality of fuss and bother, and wildly implausible quantities of things. He does in fact entertain the idea that it may be something coming from the object, through the air, that enables us to see it, but he has an answer to that:

For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the transmission of impressions of any kind made upon the air, we have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the stars and their very shapes.

No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the darkness and come to us in linked progression; if the fire thus rayed out its own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In the blackest night, when the very stars are hidden and show no gleam of their light, we can see the fire of the beacon-stations and of maritime signal-towers.^[11]

We would say, of course, that even from the distant signal-tower photons are streaming by the billions, second after second, in every direction of space. I wish to underline this point—the astonishingly large number of things that the scientific account requires—because I shall need it later on.

I now jump fifteen centuries, back to Berkeley's time, with first however a quick quotation from Leibniz to show that Plotinus's view was not just a Neoplatonic aberration. Leibniz was puzzled by the fact that each of us lives in his or her own world, and had a lot of difficulty in seeing how we could manage to have a world in common; he concluded that everyone was as it were shut in, but that God arranged for each enclosed world to agree with every other in mirroring the whole. God for Leibniz is, as can be seen in these quotations (from the Monadology ), rather in the position of the One in Plotinus.

Thus God alone is the primitive unity or the original simple substance; of which all created or derived monads are the products, and are generated, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of the Divinity. . . .^[12]

Now this connection, or this adaptation, of all created things to each and of each to all, brings it about that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that, consequently, it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.

And as the same city looked at from different sides appears entirely different, and is as if multiplied perspectively; so also it happens that, as

a result of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are as it were so many different universes, which are nevertheless only the perspectives of a single one, according to the different points of view of each monad.^[13]

Still there remains something a bit odd about this. I return to Berkeley, in his New Theory of Vision , to give the argument a more modern twist.

Berkeley is much preoccupied, as we can understand an idealist's being, with the question of why we think that the perceived world is outside us rather than inside. He concludes that it is because of the fact that part of our experience of that world is what we might call depth of field, a sense of distance or "outness," as he puts it. Once again his own words will convey the ideas best:

From what hath been premised it is a manifest consequence that a man born blind, being made to see, would at first have no idea of distance by sight; the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind. The objects intromitted by sight would seem to him (as in truth they are) no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations, each whereof is as near to him as the perceptions of pain or pleasure, or the most inward passions of his soul. . . .^[14]

Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of vision constitute an universal language of the Author of nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them. It is by their information that we are primarily guided in all the transactions and concerns of life. And the manner wherein they signify and mark unto us the objects which are at a distance is the same with that of languages and signs of human appointment, which do not suggest the things signified by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion that experience has made us to observe between them.^[15]

With this last point we are really on the contemporary scene, since language is one of the dominant philosophical preoccupations of our century. It is to be noticed that we don't share language, or inhabit the same linguistic space; language is something we each severally have. And we each have a whole language—it isn't that I have some and you have some more, but insofar as we are able to communicate, my language duplicates yours; I carry mine around with me and you do the same, so that when we meet we can speak and be understood. The same thing is true with respect to social institutions. Each of us in academic life has, for example, a whole University, and it is our carrying it around with us that makes the University—the institution, not the buildings—exist.

The idea that emerges from Leibniz and Berkeley is that we each have a perceived world; we don't live in the same one. It was popular in the seventeenth century to speak of the perceived or sense world as a "sensorium," a space full of things sensed, as an auditorium is a space full of things heard. Newton used to say that space as a whole was the sensorium of God. The point to which the argument has so far brought us is that we can imagine, if Berkeley is correct, that each of us has a private sensorium and that its contents bear no necessary resemblance to what there actually is in the world, nor to what is in other sensoria. Is there any reason to think that he is correct? We might balk at the bit about the Author of nature, and not be willing to follow Berkeley in saying, as he does, that what there actually is in the world is a lot of ideas in the mind of God, but is there some other way of interpreting the position he takes?

Suppose that instead of Berkeley's God or Plotinus's One we postulate simply "the world without us," however it may turn out to be, and suppose that instead of emanations passing through the soul or messages coming from the Author of nature we postulate the physical effect that world has on us, however that goes. But suppose we keep, from Plotinus, the notion that what we then perceive is something that proceeds from us, and from Berkeley the notion that its contents indicate to us, but do not reproduce or represent, what there is in the world without us. Suppose, in other words, we hold that something in us generates (under suitable stimulation) a sensorium and its contents, corresponding sometimes partially at least, and in some way yet to be specified, to the world there is but not necessarily being in any obvious way like it. Is this a conceivable view?

What might make it difficult to accept, or even inconceivable? One of the most implausible things about it is that it would require something in us, rather than something in the external world, to provide (in response, to be sure, to detailed instructions from without) the visible detail of the perceptual field, and that field is so rich, so nuanced, so finely grained, so charged on examination with minute and unexpected curiosities, that it seems silly to think of us as having anything to do with its production . But before jumping to conclusions let us remember all those photons, and how inconceivable it would have seemed to anyone more than a few hundred years ago—if indeed it does not still seem inconceivable—that they are really all there, rushing invisibly about; and let us also remember Yorick and his skull. When Yorick was alive, what did his skull materially contain?

The answer we can now give, although Shakespeare could not have given it, is: thirty billion neurons . A few months ago I like everyone else would have said ten billion, but recent neurological research has

given us a bonus.^[16] At all events we begin with thirty billion, though they start dying before we are born and no new ones are produced, so it is downhill all the way. However, at birth their interconnections are pretty primitive, and the epigenetic development of the brain produces networks of unbelievable complexity. The information carried in the visual field, however minutely detailed, can be handled with a tiny fraction of the available computational resources. As far as that goes, the input that triggers the generation of that field has to be handled by a mere ten million rods and cones. The fact that the number is finite means that the field ought to be grainy, and it would be if it were not for the fact that the projecting mechanism smooths that over, a spatial effect not unlike that of the smoothing-over in time that we automatically perform on the flickering images in ordinary movies.

When we look at an object, a white pitcher, for example—something that gives us a feeling of quiet and simplicity—there are actually all sorts of busy transactions going on: photons rushing and bouncing, cells in the retina firing, impulses tearing along nerves and exploding packets of chemical transmitters at synapses—but the visual field projects for us something quite different: a stable, continuous, firm entity. We might be meditating on perfection in total tranquillity, and all that frenzied activity would still be churning inside the skull. There seems to be pretty good evidence that the brain puts together the sensorium we experience from sequences of inputs that it stores and processes. We have the steady sense of being in a more or less peaceful enclosed space, relatively large and enveloping, but our eyes are darting here and there all the time, picking up bits of information and feeding them into the neural machinery, as studies of saccadic eye movement have shown.

A further reinforcement of the thesis comes from some early structuralist or protostructuralist work by Ernst Cassirer, who proposed that just as in linguistics, where we infer grammatical constants from groups of utterances or even groups of languages, we infer perceptual constants from groups of experiences.^[17] My final point is from an eccentric English cybernetician called Oliver D. Wells, who in his book, HOW COULD YOU be so naive! , borrows from Gibson the idea of an integration of overlapping contents as part of the mechanism of generating the sensorium, although he does not use that term. Gibson imagines someone sitting in a chair and looking around a room, taking in one part of it and then another and thus assembling a representation of the whole room. Wells takes the process to a more fundamental level and says simply, in effect, The brain computes the world.^[18]

Where does all this leave us with respect to our original questions? What liberated us from Plotinus's theory of vision, we might say, was

the development of a physical account of the propagation of light, the realization that the burning of the signal fire, most of whose products are wasted as heat, really does generate sufficient energy to fill the universe, locally and temporarily, with sufficiently generous numbers of photons to activate any eye within reach. What restores the theory to us, in revised form, is the development of a physical account of the operation of the brain, the realization that the complexity of the interrelations of the neurons really is great enough to provide each of us, in his or her private bony screening room, with a complete picture of the world. It is an incidental virtue of this view that it makes dreams, hallucinations, intoxication, and so on, not to mention imagination and indeed thought itself, perfectly and immediately intelligible as the functioning of the projection mechanism under other than perceptual stimuli. It remains to answer the final question—how much of the world there really is can we really know?—and to fit our possession of this apparatus into an account of ourselves: who we are, where we come from, how if enclosed in our own sensoria we can make contact with one another.

Perceptual consciousness does not always convince us of the existence of an outer world. Consider a room in which one of the walls is a mirror: we can't see the place in space, away from the edges at any rate, where the real room merges into the mirrored one, but we still don't believe there are two rooms. If we have to operate in the mirror world—as dentists sometimes do, or people backing up their cars—that doesn't pose any serious problem after a bit of practice. Experiments have been done with the total inversion of the visual field by the use of special prismatic glasses bolted to the head, and after a bit of stumbling the field rights itself (only to reverse again, with more stumbling, when the glasses are taken off). There isn't time to pursue this point, but it lends weight to Berkeley's remark that by vision "we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them." Perception, in other words, helps us to locate the icebox and not to bump into the furniture. (I mean of course the real icebox and the real furniture, not just their perceptual counterparts.)

As such it clearly has survival value, and while we cannot say that the perceptual apparatus was developed in order to be used in this way, we can say that to some degree at least the remarkable progress human beings have made in understanding what happens in the world is due to their ability to project perceptual models of it. The final question has to do with what knowledge of the "world without us" the evidence of perception allows us to claim. This falls into two problems again: other

people, and the physical world. We have reason to think (on the basis of perceptual evidence) that other people live in worlds similar to our own; nothing is lost, indeed everything is to be gained up to a point, by living practically as if we had a sensorium in common, even though we couldn't, given the physical and neurological facts, possibly do so. It might be that if your neurological impulses could be fed into my brain I would experience them as a horror movie, or it might be that I would feel at home. I think in fact the former is more likely to be the case, since I have spent fifty idiosyncratic years getting used to my world, and my strategies for being comfortable in it are very likely, in their details at least, to be very different from yours. But the latter is a more friendly thought. I could at all events expect to know the language, as it were, since the chances are that our brains were programmed in roughly similar ways, although even that is not by any means certain. Thirty billion neurons, loaded since well before birth with nonstop inputs from all five senses, will have evolved some of their own programs, and it may well be that you store the instructions for saying (or recognizing) "blue" where I store the instructions for saying or recognizing "salami." This might have interesting though uncomfortable consequences should we ever get our wires crossed.

As to the physical world, that is a different story. Everything we have learned about science suggests that away from the normal macroscopic center of things we can't form a perceptual model of it at all. We have grown up in what I call the "flat region"—a metaphor I take from the fact that the earth seems flat where we live and we need to go off into space, or make geographical inferences of one sort or another, to conclude that it is round. So in the direction of the very large, the very fast, the very distant, the very small, we can only have mathematical models of how it really is. Science began in the familiar world with the mathematical formulation of perceptual relations, and for a while we could imagine that the extensions of perception by means of instruments—microscopes, telescopes—gave us access to its remoter parts. But we know now that what is really going on, not "beneath" perception but in the world of which perception gives us only an approximate and sturdy model, suitable for our macroscopic purposes, consists of events we can't in principle perceive, among them the very events that make perception possible.

It follows from this—and I will conclude with perhaps the most preposterous claims of this essay and the ones that will seem philosophically the most uncomfortable—that the microevents to which I allude aren't happening in the world we vividly know at all. There aren't any photons in the perceptual room, and no perceptual event causes another, just as David Hume realized. So where are the photons and

the microevents in general? Why, in the real world. And what is the status of our knowledge of it? This is where we have to hold on to our seats, because nothing protects us from the conclusion that we have no direct knowledge of it whatever, that all we can ever allege about it is purely and massively hypothetical. Berkeley might be right: God might be doing it all by the word of his power, and there be no such thing as material substance. There is no reason whatever to think that this is actually the case, and anybody who claimed it was wouldn't have any better evidence than we do, in fact would have great difficulty in even tackling a lot of questions that within our hypothesis we have adequate answers for. But only within the hypothesis. There is in fact no worked-out alternative, which is why we have come to have such confidence in science. But Hume's skepticism remains unrefuted.

There is one respect, however, in which there may be a way out of our ignorance, and that is through mathematics. It seems likely that certain structural relations, such as "between," "greater than," etc., must have formal counterparts in the real world, and that we might therefore learn to speak its language—to speak at any rate with its grammar, although we would still have to use our own vocabulary. The supplementary point that needs to be made here is that to say the real is hypothetical or mathematical does not mean, as some fanciful popularizers of science have suggested, that it evaporates into formulae, is merely an idea in our heads, etc. We attribute hypothetically to the real just the kind of materiality it needs in order to sustain us, just the relations among its real parts whose mathematical expression we are able to divine. The fact that we don't know it any better doesn't mean that it doesn't exist; our knowledge or lack of it is a matter of complete indifference to it; it is , and has no need of us. Our proper attitude to it, it seems to me, should be one of gratitude for sustaining us as perceiving and feeling beings.

The real we hypothesize can have devastatingly nonhypothetical effects, of which some of the most notorious and most troubling occur in the domain of nuclear physics. The apparatus of our sensorium is adapted to flat-region phenomena, and our imagination is limited to plausible extensions of those phenomena. We can observe many chemical reactions, or their perceptual counterparts, and, horrendous as warfare is, it counted, until 1945, as a component of the familiar. One of the things that makes nuclear explosions horrific is that they constitute such a violation of the scale of possible imagined causal relations; they draw on forces we can't experience, even by courtesy, as it were. This fact may account for the automatic horror-movie feeling of their perceptual consequences. I am not sure that any good antinuclear argument could be constructed on this basis, because it looks as if it would

rule out benign uses like radiation therapy, and the like, but it might be worth working on. It seems silly to let the existence of these fragile sensoria—and they are fragile, requiring as they do the coincidence of thousands of small determinations for their perpetuation—be threatened by default. Save the Sensorium sounds like a pretty good motto. Even if I inhabit mine alone, as you do yours, we keep showing up in each other's, and it is too good a life to give up without a struggle.

27—
A Case for the Human Sciences

The Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities

In this final chapter l shall argue that research and teaching in some areas of the humanities and social sciences stand to benefit from the recognition of a coherent domain of inquiry that might properly be called the "human sciences." I say "in some areas" because I assume that there are and will continue to be empirical and quantitative features of the social sciences, and practical and creative features of the humanities, that will fall towards the natural sciences on the one hand, and towards private experience on the other, in such a way as to resist inclusion in this domain. At the same time it may also be true that, at least from the point of view of teaching, the natural sciences themselves, as human creations, might profit from the attitudes and methods of the human sciences.

The current classification of the disciplines into the three domains of the natural sciences (and mathematics), the social sciences, and the humanities (and fine arts), has a perfectly sound basis not only historically but also conceptually. In setting out the conceptual basis I shall insist on some distinctions that may appear to have been discredited, notably the methodological distinction between the natural and social sciences and the ontological distinction between fact and value. My own view is that in spite of their having lost currency these distinctions are still viable and important.

The difference between the natural and social sciences is best ex-

pressed, I think, in the contrast between things and processes among whose causal antecedents are to be found human intentions, and those among whose causal antecedents human intentions are not to be found. The former belong in the domain of the social, and the latter in the domain of the natural, sciences. Many things (such as tools, buildings, works of art, etc.) will be found in both domains, according as their meanings and uses on the one hand, or their material embodiments and properties on the other, come into question. For example, human intentions determine that a given painting should be taken as representative or abstract, should change hands at a certain price, should be attributed to a particular epoch, etc., but no such intentions determine that it will submit the wire on which it is hung to such and such a tension, that it will tear if pulled or cut with a certain force, or that if it burns it will do so at a particular temperature and with given products and residues of combustion. It should be noted that the causally-determining intentions need not be those of the maker of the object in question, nor need the event into whose causal antecedents they enter be the production of any thing , nor need what emerges be the realization of any particular intention (there may be unintentional consequences of intentional actions—but they will only be apprehended as such from the point of view of some intentionality).

The distinction between the sciences (including the social sciences) and the humanities rests on considerations of a different order. The objects of the sciences can be observed and described as they are, and the scientific theories that apply to them will be confirmed or refuted according to the content of those observations and descriptions. From the point of view of a social science inquiry, say, into the distribution of lexemes in a given text, it makes little difference whether the text is high literature or Harlequin romance. But from the point of view of the humanities it is just what distinguishes these cases, in the mode of critical judgment, that selects the one for scholarly attention and not the other. And the work of the humanities on what is thus selected consists as much in unfolding and valorizing the basis for that judgment in the particular case as in confirming and refuting any theory.

This is not, of course, to play down the role of theory in humanistic studies; it is just to insist that objects in the domain of the humanities are included there not only because they are the products of human intentions but also because they are taken to be embodiments of human value. I take value to reside not in factual presence or even structure but in a power on the part of the object, experienced and attributed as such, to evoke and hold interest and concern, even passion, in the reader, viewer, listener, etc. I say "on the part of the object"—that is how we experience it, but in fact the phenomenon of value owes as

much to the preparation of the consumer (through personal experience, acculturation, scholarly training, etc.) as to the properties of the object.

Values are facts, or are embodied in facts, to which imperatives are attached.^[1] In contrast to the sciences, whose facts once established can be left in peace and whose experiments (except in the mode of rechecking or the fulfillment of predictions) need not be repeated, the "facts" of the humanities keep always a future-referential aspect—they are to be understood, enjoyed, and preserved, and it is to deepening our future understanding, enriching our future enjoyment, and justifying the future preservation of their objects that the main energies of the humanities are directed.

Sciences and Disciplines

There is another possible contrast here that is worth drawing and will be of use in the sequel. Sciences, as their name suggests, aim at forms of knowledge, systematized and made coherent in theories. To the extent that the humanities do this they have something in common with the sciences. But an ancient opposition sets praxis over against theoria , as a matter of interacting with the world rather than internalizing a representation of it, something learned by example and by doing rather than by instruction and by thinking. This suggests a distinction between the sciences and what might properly be called "disciplines." The difference between a science and a discipline is fairly obvious—in a science the ultimate object is knowledge, about the world or about society, and what practice there is follows from the knowledge (or serves it, e.g., in experimentation), whereas in a discipline the object is an activity, carried out, of course, in a suitably disciplined way.

Literary criticism, comparative literature, and most of philosophy count as critical disciplines, whereas the practice of literature goes along with art, music, and the rest into the creative disciplines. This distinction is obviously not proposed here as a change in usage, since "discipline" in its ordinary acceptation means just what I used it to mean at the beginning of the chapter, namely, each of the sciences and humanities in their institutional setting. But what it suggests is a contrast between activity and product, and a different balance between them in the different domains. If the natural sciences have their experimental or investigative disciplines the humanistic disciplines may have their unifying and clarifying sciences. It remains to be seen what form these should take.

The Human Sciences

The term "human sciences," however, is not intended to be limited to the theoretical components of the traditional humanities only; it extends to those parts of the social sciences which (to use a distinction due to Kenneth Pike) attend to the "emic" rather than the "etic" features of their objects. Pike borrowed the suffixes from the contrast between "phonetic" and "phonemic" in linguistics and made them into freestanding terms. Phonetics deals with the way an utterance objectively is, the shape of its sounds according to a standard representation, phonemics with the way the segments of the utterance contain and convey its meaning. So "the etic viewpoint studies behavior as from the outside of a particular system, and as an essential approach to an alien system. The emic viewpoint results from studying behavior as from inside the system."^[2] Inside the system is where the meanings are; and meanings have an essential component of value.

Nor is the term "human sciences" by any means new, though it has not been generally accepted in English usage. That is no doubt because of the history of the word "science" in English. Curiously enough, though, we owe the name of the human sciences indirectly to an English original, namely, the "moral sciences" to which John Stuart Mill devoted book 6 of his System of Logic ; it was through the translation of that expression by Dilthey as Geisteswissenschaften and the rendering of this into French as sciences humaines that "human sciences" suggested itself in English. But in order for this to happen, "science" itself had to undergo a certain modification of meaning, and it may still be that this modification is not yet sufficiently general for the new terminology to be accepted without misunderstanding. (Lending the name to a seminar may perhaps in some small way help the process along.^[3] )

The English word "science" came to have its modern meaning, as a systematic body of objectively confirmed propositions about a well-defined domain of inquiry, in the eighteenth century; the term "scientist" did not emerge for another century (it is first reported in 1840), having been coined by William Whewell on the analogy of "artist."^[4] Earlier usage made what we would call a natural scientist a natural philosopher. There were also moral philosophers, who dealt not merely with ethics but also with psychology and the forerunners of what we could now call the social sciences. Mill brought over into the domain of science, under the name "moral sciences," the whole of moral philosophy—except for Morality itself, along with "Prudence or Policy, and Aesthetics," these three forming "a body of doctrine, which is properly the Art of Life, in its three departments . . . the Right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble, in human conduct and works."^[5] Art, for

Mill, was nevertheless dependent on the truths of science, and science was everything organizable according to the principles of logic.

Insofar as Mill's moral sciences were to be scientific at all, they were to be so in the same mode as the natural sciences. "The backward state of the Moral Sciences can only be remedied by applying to them the methods of Physical Science, duly extended and generalized."^[6] In the English-speaking world this principle remained unchallenged until quite recently, and the standard view in the philosophy of science was that the social sciences were just less exact natural sciences in which concessions had to be made to statistics. That view was reinforced by two twentieth-century developments (quite in line with their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antecedents, the mathematical physics of Newton and the materialism of the Enlightenment, both of which took root more firmly in British than in Continental science): the erasure of the boundary separating logic and mathematics, and the introduction of behaviorist psychology. All science thus became quantitative and "etic."

Not that Continental thought was innocent in this regard—on the contrary: one of the thinkers who had the most influence on Mill was Auguste Comte, while the advent of behaviorism was soon reinforced, first indirectly (through interpreters like A. J. Ayer) and then in person (on the part of refugees like Carnap), by the second wave of positivism, from Vienna. But a more generous interpretation of "science," or at least of its German and French equivalents, was preserved on the continent because of the original way in which Dilthey interpreted Mill. For to Mill's essentially external treatment of the moral sciences, and particularly the science of history, Dilthey added an internal component, which he identified as Verstehen or "understanding," in effect an emic component. (Though I find Pike's terminology appealing, because compact, his innovation is only a reinvention of Dilthey.)

Verstehen adds an indispensable element of interpretation to the "facts" of history; the validation of a historical claim about given events requires that the judgment of a participant in those events, or of someone who is in a position to know what it must have been like to be a participant in them, be consulted; but that judgment must be made, or have been made, from a point of view, and again the meaning of the events as judged from that point of view will involve value essentially and cannot be a merely factual matter.

A view something like this has informed the Geisteswissenschaften and the sciences humaines ever since. In this way some continuity between personal experience and the structure of the world was guaranteed, since these were mediated by a domain in which the latter could be seen only in the light of the former. One might in fact imagine a

continuum of "sciences," from one extreme at which there is no room for a subjective and personal component at all, to the other at which the last trace of the objective and impersonal has at last vanished: at this point, but only at this point, the continuum shades off from science into something else.

In the English-speaking world, however, with its "two cultures" (a pernicious over-simplification on the part of Lord Snow, the Allan Bloom of his day, who congratulated himself in public on having been spared, by his superior but of course personally merited good fortune, from the common lot), this mediation was missing. Its absence was perceptible, and this led to a revolt against scientism that turned, mistakenly in my view, against science. Some symptoms of the attempt to plug or bridge the gap, all well-intentioned no doubt but unfortunate in their consequences and implications, have been Popper's theory of objective knowledge, Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts, and Rorty's theory of cultural conversation. Another move, partly from the same and partly from different motives, was the importation into the English-speaking debate of a historicism derived from Marx rather than Dilthey.

But Popper's invention of his World III to accommodate what he took to be the objective reality of "problems" merely echoed (unconsciously no doubt—he was certainly made angry enough by the suggestion) an earlier thought of Bachelard's; Kuhn's revolutions had similarly been anticipated by Canguilhem; as to Rorty, his mixture of the disciplines into a general broth of culture was the last in a long series of similar programs that could be traced from Hegel's Encyclopedia through to Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game .

Historicism and the Linguistic Turn

In general it may be said that all these attempts to build up the low ground between scientific certainty on the one hand and existential certitude on the other suffered from an embarrassment and a lack. The embarrassment was historicism: it seemed generally to be believed that something Hegel had concocted and Marx had swallowed, that had survived the dialectical inversion from idealism to materialism, must carry the weight of plausibility if not of truth itself. Everyone therefore became politically and historically conscious and relativist—and this just as there was coming to be available the notion of a science that might be genuinely cumulative and thus in itself ahistorical, that might be fed by every culture and thus transcend cultural relativism. (It is to be noted that the opposite of "relative" in this context is not "abso-

lute" but "neutral" or "indifferent.") The lack was of an ontology that could steer between the Scylla of immutable givenness and the Charybdis of momentary animation.

The paradigm case of the sort of thing for which such an ontology was required was seen quite early on, by a few pioneers, to be language, or, in general, systems of signs or of significance. There had of course been studies of language before, grammatical or philological or comparative, but the question what signs in fact were, or language was, seems not to have been posed as a serious ontological question much before Ferdinand de Saussure (this at all events was his opinion). To be sure there had been theories of the sign, in the Stoics and then again in Charles Sanders Peirce (to mention the earliest and latest and most sophisticated entries in a long historical series), but the Stoic doctrine of the lekton , which might have developed into the required ontology, remained embryonic, while Peirce, out of modesty or disinterest or both, avoided ontological questions when he could. (A typical disclaimer occurs in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": "as metaphysics is a subject more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it, I will not trouble the reader with any more Ontology at the moment.")^[7]

Nevertheless in Peirce there are, as usual, brilliant anticipatory hints, and one of them comes in a remarkable passage at the end of his essay, "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," where he says,

The word or sign which man uses is the man himself. . . . That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself: for the man is the thought.

It is hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over the animal organism, with brute force. Now the organism is only an instrument of thought. But the identity of man consists in the consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual character of a thing, that is, is its expressing something.

Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community.

The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they to be, is only a negation.^[8]

This citation seems to me to head exactly in the right direction, only to veer off in the end. "The organism is only an instrument of thought," "reality depends on . . . the future thought of the community," "the individual . . . is only a negation": that "only" spoils a promising emphasis, and the subsequent stress on the community as against the individual compounds the error. The organism is indeed the instrument of thought, and individuals constitute the community. Yet words or signs surely are human reality, and any science of that reality will surely have to be, among other things, a science of language.

Saussure, like Peirce, seems to have been an original (each of them reinvented a term for the science of signs on the basis of the Greek semeion , Peirce choosing "semiotic" and Saussure "semiology"). But Saussure raised the ontological question directly, deciding that there must exist something called langue , a system of rules that in his words "resides in the collectivity." (He was roundly denounced for this by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, who wrote an influential book called The Meaning of Meaning , and I do not doubt that this set back the acceptance of Saussure's work in the English-speaking world.) I think this is the wrong answer, as wrong in Saussure's case as it was in Peirce's—but it was the right question, and the subsequent development of Saussurean linguistics and the structuralism that emerged from it was not in fact hampered by the wrongness of the answer (any more than Edison's development of electric light was hampered by the wildly erroneous theories of electricity generally held at the time).

Structuralism

The mistake is to give ontological priority to the community or collectivity, when it is the individual and the individual alone who embodies langue (even though its acquisition by and usefulness to any individual depends absolutely on its also being and having been embodied, individually, in other individuals). And yet the structure of langue , or of any other social system, as embodied in (or as I would wish to say "instructed into") each individual, is in fact just what it would be if it could, per impossible , be embodied in the collectivity directly, so that it can be dealt with, up to a point, as if it were so embodied. What a structuralism of objectified collective properties misses is everything that hinges on idiosyncrasy and variation as between individuals, the always discrete processes of diffusion and instruction, and these things can become important. To a first approximation it will do, because it is useful to be able to speak of languages or cultures in general. But in detail it won't do, because no two people have exactly the same lan-

guage, nor do they share exactly any social object, even in the elementary case of the freely-formed couple (the clearest illustration of the dependence of the collective on individuals, since it comes into being when, but only when, each partner says so, and ceases to exist—except residually in the intentional domains of third parties—as soon as either partner says so).

The truly central contribution of structuralism, which Saussure articulated avant la lettre as well as anyone has done since, is its insistence on the differential and relational character of the objects with which it deals, as opposed to the self-identical and substantial character of the objects of the natural sciences. The opposition between the two cases can now be put in yet another way: the entities with which the natural sciences deal can be thought of as preexisting and independent of the relations into which they enter; higher-level entities (consisting of lower-level entities in relation) still preserve this thing-like independence with respect to each other and the relations into which they in turn enter.^[9] The entities with which the social sciences deal, however, are constituted out of relations, apprehended by some consciousness or other, produced by some intentionality, presumably human (since human intentionalities are the only ones we know anything about).

Structures are sets of relations, and structuralism just is the view that the objects of the social (or as we may now say human) sciences are relational rather than substantial. In other words, the natural is there whether or not it is thought about, the social is not there unless it is thought about. Or again, more succinctly yet: the appropriate metaphysics for the natural sciences is realism, the appropriate metaphysics for the social or human sciences is idealism.

The flowering (and fading) of structuralism need not be recounted here, but a couple of its eccentricities do need to be noticed, since they contributed, I believe, to a general failure to perceive that it did in fact offer the human sciences the theoretical foundation they were lacking. Partly because of Saussure's location of langue in the collectivity and partly, no doubt, because of an exaggerated respect for Marxism, it came to be generally thought that the structures with which structuralism dealt were objective in the old natural-scientific way, and even that they were somehow not merely intelligible but intelligent, capable of independent agency.

That they do have some objectivity at the neurophysiological level there is little reason to doubt, but such structures are not available for explanatory purposes within the human sciences—human beings use them (in some sense of "use," though certainly not the normal purposive one) to think the intentional structures they do think, but they themselves remain objects for a natural science just as any useful device

would, and are as little capable of agency or purpose as any other complex physical arrangement. This however was not the objectivity that Lévi-Strauss and Foucault had in mind when they represented language and myth and power and sexuality as cunning forces in the world whose unwitting pawns we are, when they insisted on saying not "we think the world through myths" but rather "myths think themselves through us," not "I write" but rather "I am written," and other such dark formulae.

I call this aberration "misplaced agency"; its effect is to deny subjective agency on our part or even, with sublime inconsistency (since its proponents are themselves the subjects of their own utterances and intentions), subjectivity itself. The structuralists talked a lot about the elimination of the subject in favor of an interplay of structures, thus missing the important point that subjectivity is in fact the animation of structure and the only thing that makes structures function as they do.

Of course I don't animate the whole English language, say, all by myself; it transcends me, but only in the persons of other individuals with their own subjectivity , not as an "objective" structure that can dispense with such embodiment. That there are very many individuals involved (all the English-speakers throughout history) explains on the one hand why the English language seems so historically entrenched, to the point of taking on a kind of objectivity, but on the other hand and at the same time why a theory that insists on the individual embodiment of structure is adequate to carry the ontological weight of the social: precisely because the burden is so widely shared.

This last example may be taken as paradigmatic, but it leaves out one important consideration, namely, the role of what Sartre called the "practico-inert" as a carrier of structure, or rather as a template or generator by means of which structure is perpetually re-created for subjects. This must be an element in any developed human science. Such sciences need to be constructed with all the slow care that goes into the construction of any science, and can be, in the confidence that their objects have, in their own way, the sort of permanence that makes successive approximations and repeated confirmations possible. Because of the dominance of relativism and historicism, however, there has come to be an assumption that major theoretical positions will succeed one another with some regularity and frequency, and that there is something stagnant about a field that does not undergo the appropriate revolution every decade or so.

In the natural sciences there have been, it is true, revolutionary theoretical changes in the last century; but in spite of metatheoretical claims to the contrary, the process of slow convergence has not really been compromised. Its apparent acceleration has been due to the very

large numbers of workers whose inquiries have cross-fertilized one another and to the similarly accelerated changes in available technology due also to exponentially growing numbers in that domain. The world, however, remains as it was, submitting inertly (I am tempted to say patiently, but the world is no more patient than it is agent) to experimental probes and reacting consistently again and again to the same actions. It is this perpetual availability of nature that makes the natural sciences as happily cumulative as they are, even when current work is at conceptually distant frontiers.

It might seem that everything must be different with the human sciences, that their objects are perpetually different rather than similar, that the winds of change and fashion make any convergence impossible. Certainly the breathless succession of postures, since modernism and structuralism came on the scene, seems to be informed by some such conviction (one critic has spoken of "the new maelstrom" of poststructuralist modernity.^[10] ) But if the human sciences can only agree on the kind of thing they are about—and that is the task I have been trying to advance in this chapter—they may find themselves able to consolidate in a way that transcends, without betraying, the individuals who create and sustain those objects and inform them with history (rather than being dragged along by it; a plausible case could be made for the view that only individuals have histories, or even history, but that must await another occasion).

Certainly structuralism in some of its modes seems to approach this condition, being as it is as much at home with classical mythology as with seventeenth-century drama or contemporary sexuality; with its (Saussurean) doctrine of the synchronic it may be on its way to the conquest of time that the natural sciences have naturally and unconsciously achieved. Humans, it is true, cannot be considered as enduring as nature. But if we conservatively estimate their endurance on this earth so far (which is not to be confused with their history) at, say, a quarter of a million years, and optimistically grant them the expectation of an equal run into the future, that should give the human sciences time to establish themselves. The natural sciences, after all, have in their mature form managed it in a few centuries.

A New Understanding of Science

A final word as to what that mature form is. One of the misunderstandings of natural science (to which natural philosophers and their scientist successors since the eighteenth century have themselves been prone) is that it is a total system, a coherence that reaches over the

universe and everything in it, a potentially complete account of the state and causal determination of everything at some appropriate level: physical, chemical, or whatever. It is this "mirror of nature" view to which some recent criticism has been addressed, and that some of the social or human sciences have unwisely tried to imitate. But of course science is no such thing, though in the heady days of the triumphant Newtonian world-view it was easy to think that that was what it might become. Laplace is notorious for having formulated this culmination of progress with his vision of an intelligence for whom "nothing would be uncertain . . . the future, like the past, would be directly present to his observation."^[11] Whether God or demon, this intelligence is no longer conceivable, and not only because of Heisenberg, Gödel, and the rest. It is not so much that a Newtonian paradigm has been displaced by an Einsteinian one (Kuhn has much to answer for in his careless adaptation of that word)—indeed, Newton hasn't been displaced, except at the remote fringes of conceptual possibility—it's rather that Newton never covered even his own domain in the way Laplace thought. Newton could give a complete account of how two massive bodies would interact in an otherwise empty universe, and the whole success of Newtonian science has consisted in pretending that real events can be represented as aggregates of independent pairwise interactions, as up to a pragmatically satisfactory limit they can. But Newton couldn't, and science still can't, give a complete account of how three massive bodies would interact, even in an otherwise empty universe.

If science can't even solve the three-body problem in mechanics, its most elementary branch, how can anyone ever have thought that it could mirror the whole of nature? We can appreciate and learn from the natural sciences without making that mistake—indeed, learning from them depends on our not making that mistake. The assumption that total discursive adequacy was what science claimed (rather than being what some immoderate scientists and their admirers claimed) has obscured the genuine lesson that science has to teach.

A good paradigm case (using the metaphor exactly rather than wildly) of the scientific treatment of an event is to be found at the beginning of modern science with Galileo's equation for the motion of a ball on a smooth inclined plane. A bit of the world, experimentally delimited, is matched by a bit of discourse, formally constructed; the matching is exact and reproducible. Might we find another bit of the world, somewhere else, and another discursive match? We might indeed—many of them—and this is how science grew. Might these bits join up, so that the experimental domains could be seen to be connected and the discursive domains unite in a larger science? This too happened, most dramatically in Newton's truly prodigious merger of Kepler's ce-

lestial with Galileo's terrestrial mechanics, through his inspired conjecture that the moon might be falling towards the earth, as indeed it perpetually is. Will this process go on until the whole world, in all its detail, is matched by a single science?

To this question eighteenth-century science gave an excited and prematurely affirmative answer, but on reflection it is obvious that the very idea involves a paradox, like the map, somewhere in Borges I think, that in the end was as big and as real as the country itself. Even if we overlook the small matter of the three-body problem, it is clear that when the science comes to match what is in the scientist's head some difficulty will arise, since after all that is where the science itself is and must be. Science is not in the scientist's world but about it, and we are the only beings we know capable of sustaining the relation "about."

How far, then, can the coherent domain of science extend? Well, as far as it does extend—and, up to now, no further. There is no Platonic science waiting to be realized, only an Aristotelian one achieved and articulated as best we have been able to do these things, which under the circumstances is pretty well, though the resulting science is and will always remain partial. We can be convinced that the world is one and causally connected (up to the creative moment we inhabit) without thinking that we must strive for one scientific representation of it. This thought is in fact an echo of Aristotle:

An infinity of things befall . . . one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. One sees, therefore, the mistake of all the poets who have written a Heracleid , a Theseid , or similar poems; they suppose that, because Heracles was one man, the story also of Heracles must be one story.^[12]

The lesson here, for the natural sciences, is one of restraint as to what they can pretend, but for the human sciences it is one of encouragement and liberation. For, in the sense I have been insisting on, they can be as scientific as any discipline in finding discursive matches for their objects and articulating these into as ramified a structure as the traffic will bear. The "coherent domain of inquiry" referred to in my very first paragraph will be a limited domain, but by now that goes without saying. No doubt part of its activity will be its own perpetual deconstruction. But if responsibly carried out, this activity will leave some things in place, and it is in the cumulative articulation of what thus remains in place that the human sciences are established. For a science is possible wherever there is some constancy of object and some stability in discourse.

As to constancy of object, Latin verse is still with us after two thou-

sand years, and Baroque music after two hundred; I see no reason why, along with Cubist painting and other more recent arrivals, they should not still be occupying the attention of the human sciences thousands of years from now. The essential difference between this and the natural-scientific case is that these things will endure only if the means of reading them out of the practico-inert continue to be instructed into generation after generation. This is a chain that can be broken and probably will be, in the eventual dissolution or transcendence of our present environment, but it may well have a run some orders of magnitude longer than cultural history so far. It might be broken also by despair, brought on by irresponsible and unstable metatheory.

But the metatheory, I think, only seems unstable. The late twentieth century, in fact, seems to have something in common with the late eighteenth—then everyone was being excitable about the world's hanging together; now people are getting excited about its falling apart. But the real work of the sciences, whether natural or human, goes on at a different level, not under some fashionable "paradigm" but in the confrontation of their objects and the imaginative structuring of their discourse. The aim in both cases is the same: to understand the world and to articulate its representations, testing the limits of possibility. Among the objects to be understood are the sciences themselves. In the case of the human sciences the construction of such an understanding is a reflexive activity, a thought which I now turn self-referentially back as a means of closure.