The Will: Volume 1, Dual Aspect Theory

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THE WILL

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O’Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. b r i an o’sh au ghn es s y teaches philosophy at King’s College London. He is the author of Consciousness and the World (2000) and many articles on the philosophy of mind.

THE WILL A dual aspect theory I

BRIAN O’SHAUGHNESS Y King’s College London

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521853668 © Brian O’Shaughnessy 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13 978-0-511-41365-0

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978-0-521-85366-8

hardback

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978-0-521-61952-3

paperback

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For my father William O’Shaughnessy

Contents to volume I

Acknowledgements Glossary

page xii xiii

Introduction

1

pa rt i t h e l i m i ts o f t h e w i l l 1 The logical limits of the will 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

53

Introduction Distinguishing ‘the willing of ’ from ‘the willed’ Necessarily, no sensation is a willing A universal limit upon the extension of the will The unwillability of belief The unwillability of willing The unwillability of striving

53 53 55 58 60 67 72

2 Is the body the final boundary of the will?

74

1 2 3 4 5

Metaphysics Metaphysical limits Natural kinds and the bodily will Extending the will beyond the body (1): the problem Extending the will beyond the body (2): the explanation

3 Extending the will beyond the body 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Attempting to explain ‘I can will extra-bodily events’ An extensionalist test for metaphysical volitionism Why prefer the volitionist novel usage of active terms? A summary of the state of play Building up the concept of a physical action (1): the knowledge factor (A) Building up the concept of a physical action (2): the knowledge factor (B) Building up the concept of a physical action (3): the means–end and feeling-awareness factors

vii

74 76 77 84 89

97 97 104 109 122 125 131 136

viii

Contents

4 Magic versus mechanism in action 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Is it a metaphysical fact that I can move my arm? The unity of agent and mechanism reflected in speech-pragmatics A dialectical synthesis of the concepts of act and mechanism Interiorist denials of the problem A summary account (1) A summary account (2) The required non-metaphysical extension of the will beyond the body

141 141 145 147 154 159 165 167

pa rt i i t h e i m m e d i at e o b j e c t o f t h e w i l l Introduction 5 The given 1 2 3 4

Introduction The conditions of action Kinaesthetic and postural sensations The given: a unitary whole

6 The location of sensations 1 2 3 4 5 6

A theory of sense perception The actual physical location of sensations Projection and psychological space Attempting to state the criteria and sense of ‘place of a sensation’ Causal considerations A brief r´esum´e of chapters 5 and 6

7 The body-image (1): myth and reality 1 2 3 4 5

The unconscious mythology of the body-image Comparing ‘body sense’ and sense perception The most extreme interiorist theory of bodily willing The concept of body-image Short- and long-term body-image

8 The body-image (2): the long-term body-image 1 2 3 4 5 6

Index

The hypothesis of the long-term body-image Filling in the concept of the long-term body-image The type and ontological status of the long-term body-image The univocality of ‘long-term body-image’ Is the long-term body-image an a priori postulate? Conclusion

171 179 179 180 187 200

203 204 211 214 219 224 234

244 244 247 261 262 273

282 282 287 290 291 293 296

299

Contents

ix

C O N T E N T S TO VO L U M E I I

Acknowledgements Glossary

xii xiii

pa rt i i i d ua l a s pe c t t h e o ry Introduction 9 Observation and the will 1 2 3 4 5

My actions are set in my world The interdependence of physical action and perception Agent and observer Doing two things at once Self-dispersal as the end of the impossible project of relating as observer to one’s own actions

10 Sub-Intentionality and the scope of the intention 1 2 3 4

Introduction Preliminary questions Putative examples of sub-intentional action Conclusion

11 Voluntariness and the volition 1 2 3 4 5

The theory of the volition Voluntary actions The dilemma Theories of the voluntary The truth value of volitionism

12 The proof of a dual aspect theory of physical action 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Whenever we physically act we are immediately aware of trying or striving or attempting or ‘having a shot at’ doing some act or other The ‘doing’ phenomenon of which the subject is immediately aware is an event of psychological ontological status The trying is non-identical with and distinct from present intending No interior striving could be visible in limb movements Physical instrumental tryings are sometimes physical actions Physical instrumental tryings are psychological phenomena The ‘psycho-physical’ The general schema for act-constitution Interiorism Exteriorism Interiorism/exteriorism

311 317 317 319 326 331 341

349 349 350 352 361

363 363 365 371 380 383

385 386 388 390 393 397 403 411 420 423 424 426

x

Contents 11a 12

Postscript Dual aspect theory

13 The definition of action 1 2 3 4

The definition of basic action The extension of ‘action’ The definition of action Testing the definition of action: four problem cases

14 Defining the psychological and the mental 1 2 3 4 5 6

Uncertainty over the ontological status of physical actions Delimiting the psychological Ontology and the mind Defining the mental (1) Defining the mental (2) Conclusion

15 The ontological status of physical action 1 2 3 4 5

437 438

449 449 451 455 463

472 472 474 475 478 481 484

486

Introduction Precisely fixing the ontological status of the bodily will The unique structure of the bodily action The mind’s body and the body’s mind Animal and spiritual mind

486 488 491 496 502

16 Dual aspect theory and the epistemology of physical action

511

1 2 3 4 5

The third-person epistemological implications of dual aspectism The first-person epistemological implications of dual aspectism The experiential status of willing Explanation and perception A residual problem

511 516 521 524 526

pa rt i v f ro m m i n d to b o dy Introduction 17 The antecedents of action (1): from desire to intention 1 2 3 4 5

Mental causality Desire Deciding Choosing Intending

18 The antecedents of action (2): from intending to trying 1 2 3

The logico-nomic relation between intending and trying Proving the entailment-law Omnipotent self-determination

531 535 535 541 543 547 549

571 571 575 578

Contents 4 5

xi

A dialectically enriched account of self-determination The dialectics of desire

581 584

19 The antecedents of action (3): from will to action

586

1 2 3

The second logico-causal law: the law linking the will with its bodily goal The third logico-causal law: the law linking will and action Bridging the mind–body gap

20 The ‘mental pineal gland’ 1 2 3

Index

R´esum´e: two laws The interdependence of will and body From inner to outer

586 592 596

598 598 600 605

609

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR THE FIRST EDITION

I wish to record my indebtedness to a large number of colleagues and students, whose comments on many of the views expressed in this work have greatly helped me. Most especially to Miss S. Botros, Mr G. Cohen, Mr B. Klug, Miss S. Lumley-Smith, Professor N. Malcolm, Professor P. Winch, Professor R. Wollheim. And I would like particularly to thank my wife and family for their encouragement and support during the writing of the book. My thanks to The Philosophical Review for permission to reprint sections of ‘The Limits of the Will’ (1956). My thanks also to The Journal of Philosophy for permission to reprint sections of ‘Observation and The Will’ (1963), and of ‘Trying (as the Mental “Pineal Gland”)’ (1973). ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR THE SECOND EDITION

I would like especially to thank Professor Naomi Eilan for encouraging me to write several sections of the work. In addition, to thank the participants in a seminar held at UCLA in 1986, and especially the comments of Mr Charles Crittenden, Mr Lawrence Fike, and Mr Warren Quinn. Finally, I would like once again to record my indebtedness to my wife for her encouragement and support.

xii

Glossary

The following expressions occur in the text with the senses given below: action: I here follow standard contemporary philosophical usage. Examples: murder, rape, theft. Non-examples: sleeping, knowing, ageing. activity: I follow standard usage in reserving this term for the active process whose continuation goes to constitute action-events of their type. Examples: the processes of murdering, or of listening. Non-examples: murder, hearing. basic action: I follow standard contemporary philosophical usage, so that the basic act is the act of immediately moving one’s limbs. Examples: familiar cases of moving one’s limbs. Non-examples: opening the door, moving one limb by the means of moving another limb, contracting one’s biceps by moving that arm. bodily action: a bodily action is either a basic action, or a constitutive action or instrumental action which occurred because a basic action or bodily trying occurred that was causally responsible for the t-kind event required for that T-type of action. Examples: twiddling one’s thumbs, opening the front door by turning the latch key, contracting one’s biceps by moving one’s arm. Non-examples: listening, making one’s mouth water by thinking of juicy steaks. constitutive action: the stipulated sense I give to this expression is as follows. It is the act of bringing about events within the motormechanism of limb-moving by the immediate means of either moving or trying to move that limb. Examples: contracting one’s biceps by moving one’s arm, contracting one’s biceps by trying to move one’s imprisoned arm. Non-example: contracting one’s biceps by means of an electrical stimulus.

xiii

xiv

Glossary

event: this is the standard use observed by contemporary authors. Examples: skids, deaths, battles, murders. Non-example: the continuing solidity of a rock. instrumental action: I follow standard usage. An act rates as instrumental of type T iff an act of type T occurred because some act or trying caused the t-kind event required for T-type acts. Examples: opening a door by kicking, causing goose pimples by thinking of poetry, generating sweat by trying to move an imprisoned arm. phenomenon: I use this as a generic term to cover both events and processes. Examples: earthquakes, thefts, dissolvings, meltings. process: I think I follow standard usage here. I take it to be a phenomenal continuity, such that when that continuity has come to an end a single countable event has occurred that is the same in type. Example: the skidding (process) went on continuously for two seconds, so that a two-second-long skid (event) occurred. Non-example: the continuing solidity of a rock. willed: the usage I follow is such that an event is willed if it is the event that is the first or immediate object of the active event that occurs when we act, and therefore also of the generating act-desire. Therefore neither the events brought about in instrumental actions nor the events produced in constitutive actions are willed, whether desired or not. Example: the arm movements of swimmers. Non-examples: the muscle changes in swimmers, the movement of a swimmer through the water, the noise I intentionally produce by knocking on a door. I shall use the letter ‘φ’ throughout the entire text to single out such an event. willing of: the usage I follow is such that when an event φ is willed, then the act which was the act of φ-making, and effect of the act-desire directed towards φ occurrence, is ‘a willing of φ’. Example: the basic act of arm raising is a willing of arm rise. I shall use the letter ‘’ throughout the entire text to single out such a bodily action. Note: I use the following terms interchangeably throughout the text: ‘action’/‘act’, and also ‘try’/‘strive’.

Introduction

My interest in this topic is of long standing. It goes back to the time when as a student (of Engineering, as it happens) in Melbourne I first encountered the works of Schopenhauer. In particular, I remember the impact of his profound and original observations concerning the very special epistemological relation in which a man stands to the active movements of his own body (‘the philosophical thought par excellence’, Schopenhauer called it). Since that time, profiting above all from the ideas of Wittgenstein, but also of Anscombe and Hampshire and especially of recent years Donald Davidson, I have continued to think about this question and about the will and the body more generally. What follows in this work is a statement of what might be called the natural history of philosophical thought about the will. In any case it sets out the path my own speculations have followed. And it does so roughly in the order in which they occurred. My concern is for the most part with bodily rather than mental willing. That explains why I have been drawn into an investigation of the several constituent problems of the mind–body problem. It is I think impossible to say much of value about bodily action if one leaves these issues unexamined. And that accounts to a degree for the length of this work. For it seems that a satisfactory answer to absolutely any philosophical question requires that one provide some sort of answer to a set of related other questions. Thus, a very general account of the mind–body relation is offered in the pages that follow. But as well as this, for reasons which I shall in due course expound, I have felt the need to provide a theory of the sensation, of sense-perception, of consciousness, of the psychological, indeed of the mind itself. A word about the mind–body problem. Contemporary materialism has accustomed us to think of this in terms of the question: Are mind and body one and the same thing? The operative domain is ontology, and the central concept identity. Yet the great importance of this problem has tended to blind us to certain other issues. For example, the question of how we make epistemological contact with our own bodies, and the character of 1

2

Introduction

that unique relation. Or the problem of ‘ontological descent’, of intelligibly relating such ontologically diverse and causally linked phenomena as intentions and mere bodily movements. And as well as these, what might perhaps be termed ‘the body to mind problem’, by which I mean the problem of providing such a characterisation of the mind as will show that it is intrinsically fitted to belong to what is endowed with a body – an odd and rather neglected question. Each of these three questions looms large in the text. The first or epistemological issue provides the subject matter of Part II of the work, while significant slices of Parts III and are given over to the remaining two problems. These particular questions, while directly impinging on the theme of bodily action, lead inevitably into others. Thus, how could one understand the epistemological relation that holds between an animal and the material object that is its own body, if one did not know how it managed through its senses to make epistemological contact with other material objects? In short, I need a theory of sense-perception. The theory which for a variety of reason recommends itself to me is representational in type, where the representational medium is sensation in all cases but touch (where it is the spatial properties of active bodily movements), and in monocular visual perception (at least) is visual sensation arrayed in two-dimensional bodyrelative physical space. I say those sensations are set in two rather than three dimensions because, even though all sensations must have a last cause that is purely physical and non-psychological, two indistinguishable (monocular) visual sensuous expanses could be generating two quite different though veridical visual depth experiences, purely as a result of the causal efficacy of extra-visual mental factors like belief or previous experience. Of course, this theory depends upon a demonstration of the reality of visual sensations; yet psycho-physical causal considerations, and an examination of the concepts of sensation and the attention, coupled with the existence of visual illusions, make that not all that hard to come by. And it requires us to construe visual hallucinatory and dream visual experience as non-representational phenomena, since visual sensations do not usually represent the objects of such experience. But that, too, is no serious difficulty: for neither experience is a visual experience, being instead episodes in the visual imagination that are of such a kind that necessarily and delusorily they seem at the time to their owner indistinguishable from visual experiences. Dream and hallucinatory visual experience, in contrast with mental imagery, are precisely what happens in the visual imagination when the sense of reality is not all that it might be. Being weakened in this vital respect, we have merely to contact the imaginative realm to lose ourselves in it. Thus, whatever Descartes

Introduction

3

may have believed, these experiences are different experiences from visual experiences, veridical or otherwise. So much by way of justification for the somewhat imperialistic manner in which my topic invades the territory of its neighbours. i life Why the topic of action? Why not consciousness or emotion? Certainly, it has been ‘in the air’ for some time. One has merely to reflect on the existence of movements as disparate as pragmatism, behaviourism, existentialism, to realise that there must be something special about action so far as our age is concerned. It seems that in deciding to philosophise about this phenomenon, one does something more than pick at random out of a hat. And can there be anything more dispiriting than the idea of such a ‘philosophical lucky dip’? – suggesting as it does that the mind is a mere concatenation of loosely knit items, whereas we know that it is a unity that of its very nature aspires to even greater unity – and that hierarchies of importance, let alone positions of absolute pre-eminence, cannot conceivably reign in the mind – whereas it seems certain that they do. Then there are grounds for thinking, not merely that action locks tightly into the edifice of the mind, but that it is endowed with just such a pre-eminence. In short, the fashion in this topic is almost certainly more than mere fashion. This topic has I believe a particular appeal for particularly good reasons. Doubtless it is in some way close to the ‘nerve of the age’. Then how does it come about that action should matter so at this moment? In the seventeenth century it was above all consciousness and experience, aided and abetted by reason: a spiritual entity endeavouring to make perfect cognitive contact with the physical world in which its body was situated, choosing as its point of departure a state of mind. Today this interests us less. Why? Well, four centuries of triumphant advance by the rock-bottom science of physics cannot but leave some mark on philosophy. When one can predict the wavelength of a spectrum line to eight decimal places, it is rather more difficult to believe that the underlying reality of everything is spiritual, e.g. an immaterial Deity. After all, should a Deity be so fastidious? In any case, the Deity of the seventeenth century, reduced to apparent inaction by the law-regulated world disclosed by physics, Spectator-God doomed to almost total inertia by His seemingly autonomous creation, and somewhat as the domain of the putative magical inevitably retreats before the advance of crafts, faded somewhat. The brilliantly successful Promethean raid upon the Divine Laboratory

4

Introduction

laid bare the apparent self-sufficiency of nature and tended to depose the Deity (rightly or wrongly, whether by killing or humiliation, whether temporarily or permanently, in the minds of Europeans). Now metaphysics of The World and metaphysics of Man usually move in parallel (as when the Noumenon finds itself matched by the Noumenal Self ). Accordingly, this shift in the metaphysics of Nature appeared at the same time as a new metaphysics of Man. If all that exists is a physical world with a nature of its own, surely man must be a similar sort of something. Thus, naturalistic aspects of human nature, as one might say, figured increasingly in theories of human nature; while in harmony with the fading away of a Mind that stood apart from Nature, the process of naturalisation spread without limit. Above all, the mind became naturalised. For is it not true of the mind that it is, not merely ‘ticking over’ in time, not merely consuming and generating energy, but – alive? Yet what does that mean? Doubtless it is a stipulation, albeit a stipulation that is extremely natural and compelling. Then I suggest we must mean something more than that the mind plays its functional part in a living organism. That after all would be true of an artefact organ like a mechanical heart. Yet whereas artefacts are what essentially they are purely because of relational properties, it would be an error to suppose of psychological items that they are what minimally (i.e. under minimally ambitious descriptions) and essentially they are purely because of relational properties. For example, if they are experiences, and there is something that it is like to have them, a relational analysis is plainly out of the question. In that special sense, they are what they are because of how they are, or as one might say intrinsically. Even though pains and images possess necessary causal properties, it cannot be said they are pains and images through possessing those traits. Two artefacts that were in themselves indistinguishable might be endowed with diverse essences, but nothing could be in itself experientially indistinguishable from pain or image without being pain or image. These items wear their heart upon their sleeve: they give their ‘all’ in experience, have no depth, no hidden or other side. Accordingly, they cannot appear in other worlds in different guise. What we now call ‘redness’ could not in another world reappear as what we now call ‘greenness’. What kind of identity would these properties have otherwise? In speaking of redness, we know what we are talking about. And not merely which ‘what’. We know what ‘what’. We have come to the end of that particular road. In short, a great number of psychological phenomena are both intrinsically and essentially what minimally they are. In the most powerful degree they are what they are in and of themselves. Then wherever such items

Introduction

5

occur in natural objects, those natural objects are living and the psychological phenomena manifest that vital condition. More, it seems next to certain that psychological items are unique to life. And so if anything has a right to be termed a ‘vital phenomenon’, these phenomena have. Indeed, as the only natural material objects apart from mere chunks and rudimentary objects (rocks, planets, meteorites, crystals, etc.) are living objects – which suggests the possibility of an a priori definition of Life as the most general type of all natural material objects that are that and significantly more: that is, that Life is necessarily the first ontological development amidst natural material objects – so it may be that the only necessarily vital phenomena apart from coming-to-life (and departing-from-life?) are psychological phenomena. After all, psychologicality is the next great ontological shift after, and on the necessary basis of, the very first ontological development, viz. Life. Then what do we mean in saying of the mind that it is alive? But what sort of a thing is the mind? The mind consists and exclusively of the systematically and causally interrelated phenomena of type psychological that occur in some object. These phenomena populate the one enduring and mutating mind as the elements of a particular system people that system. Accordingly, if the mind is an entity, it is of the type particular system, rather as a book or painting are particular systems. Then is it an entity? It would seem that it is. But hardly a substantival entity, seeing it is constituted exclusively out of items that are of necessity dependent upon the existence of its owner. This non-substantival system-entity is necessarily possessed by some (substantival) being that is in turn necessarily possessed of a (substantival) body-object with which it is non-identical and from which it is non-distinct. Yet surely only substantival entities like animals or cells can be alive? Indeed, surely only material objects can be alive? This is, I think, true. It must be admitted that the mind is not the sort of thing that can, literally speaking, be alive or dead. But it would be a mistake to leave matters at that. For there is an extremely natural and illuminating stipulative sense in which the mind can be said to be alive: namely, in that it is exclusively constituted out of items that are, in the sense explained, vital phenomena, and in all probability essentially vital phenomena. An entity that is a system exclusively built out of phenomena that essentially manifest the life of their living owner, has one would suppose some sort of a right to be designated ‘alive’. This is the justification of the stipulation. Indeed, there are reasons for thinking that the relation between mind and life is even more intimate than the above would suggest, and that in consequence an even stronger stipulation is possible. I will try to explain

6

Introduction

this by delimiting some of the fundamental relations holding between a man – and his mind – and his body – and that particular state of the organism that is its being alive. Thus, just as the matter of a man is the matter of his body, so the life of a man is the life of his body; for the death of one is the death of the other. Then while the place of the death of the body is that of the body, it necessarily encompasses the place of the organ of the mind, so that the brain must be the place of the events essential to the man’s death. Therefore while the place of the life of the body is that of the body, the brain must be the place of the states essential to the life of the man. Thus, the brain’s life must be the essential part of the life of the man. Then since the life of the mind must be that of the brain, the mind’s life must be the essential part of the life of the man – though not of course in opposition to that of brain or body. The life of the mind, which is that of the organ whose function it is to support a mind, is the essential part of the life of man and indeed of body too. That is, the state that ensures the possibility of psychological items in some man is the essential part of the state of being alive, both in that being and in its body. Now such a structural situation is unique to animality. In no other form of life is there such a ‘life centre’ or ‘spirit’. Thus, the death of a plant is a phenomenon that is no more localisable than the plant itself, and this doubtless reflects the fact that, whereas some existent plants are dead, no existent animal is anything but alive. Death for a plant consists in the departure of a specific state from a particular entity; and the same holds of the death of animal bodies; yet this last event, which is also the death of the animal, consists in the animal’s transition from existence to non-existence. This may appear a trifle paradoxical. For an event that is the change in one entity from one state to its absence, is the event that is the change from existence to nonexistence of another entity. What is change in one thing, is the movement out of existence of another. But if the mind is alive, it must be able to die. Yet we know that, sick as a mind can get, it cannot die of its own ailments! Who ever heard of a man’s mind dying from schizophrenia? If it could, then so too could he and his body! How could a body die of a mind’s illness? Who ever heard of a man dying of schizophrenia? While melancholia can kill, it can do so only indirectly through causing physical illness or through enlisting the aid of the self-slaying hand of the melancholic. The mind so to say cannot plunge the dagger into itself. Then perhaps the mind is not alive after all? It is, I think, in the sense indicated, certainly alive. Indeed, the relations between man, mind, body, brain, life, delineated above, are such that we can now give an even stronger and more compelling sense to ‘the mind’s life’.

Introduction

7

Thus, ‘the mind’s life’ must mean the state which ensures the possibility of psychological vital items in the animal. So that ‘the death of the mind’ must be, the event that is the loss of ‘the mind’s life’, and therefore the event that is the necessarily irreversible loss of the possibility of psychological vital items in the animal. Whereupon ‘the mind cannot die of its own ailments’ must mean that necessarily the explanation of the fact that no psychological vital item necessarily can ever occur again in some animal, must be physical non-psychological. The reason for this last being, that the death of the mind encompasses all events essential to the death of the body, and the mind depends for its existence upon the body as the body does not on the mind. After all, the one outsurvives the other. Then these facts should act as a curb to certain varieties of Idealism. And they prompt me to ask the following question of those who accept the logical possibility of disembodied existence: Are the hypothetical disembodied mental processes to be thought of as occurring in a dead mind? (A grim place! Presumably for terrible events!) For has not the mind of necessity died along with the man and body? But how can a dead mind think? Indeed, how can one whose mind has died so much as exist in any form whatever, to engage in thinking? Then does not the fact that some philosophers have entertained the logical possibility of a person and mind surviving bodily (sic) death, show that the bad old ideas linger, whereby the life of the mind, though not that of the body, and in despite of hollow expressions like ‘eternal life’, is not really to be taken seriously; indeed, where the human mind is thought of as akin to the mind of an angel or Deity, as the scene of rational events that in themselves give no sign of occurring in something that is alive: sheer instantiations in time of rational relations! As if bodily phenomena were part of a life process, but mental phenomena something altogether else. Here we have a sort of vitalist dualism. While the psychologisation of logic is a grave error, the logicisation of psychology is no less. ii nineteenth-century ‘will’ The prevailing metaphysical conceptions of human nature in nineteenthcentury European thought tended on the whole to involve the assumption that the mind, no less than the body, is a living phenomenon. This was for example an unquestioned tenet for Freud, who charted the development of the mind of the entire human species as one might the growth of a plant, delineating ‘phases’ in which basic mental functions (like internalisation) were modelled upon rudimentary bodily functions (like feeding), that were simultaneously stages in the development of non-‘narcissist’

8

Introduction

or properly realistic ‘object relations’. Then the process of naturalisation, which is not as such one of reduction and might instead be an enlargement or complexification, leads to a highlighting of the phenomenon of desire. For naturalisation inevitably leads one’s theory back into the past of the mind, and desire runs deep in the human mind (and deeper far than that relatively late development, reason). Consonant with the vastly enlarged powers over nature that developed with the application of physics to the world, it seemed to many in the nineteenth century that the human mind harboured deep and natural desire-like forces (‘Will’, so called) comparable to the forces that were being tapped in the environment ‘without’. Now ‘Will’ is often construed either as ‘impulsive act urge’ or else as ‘striving’ – the latter phenomenon being uniquely the expression-effect of the former: a kinship that explains the fluctuation in the sense of the word. And my concern is mostly with ‘striving’ will. Yet precisely because of that kinship I shall not always press the distinction. For it is natural to think of ‘the will’ less differentially as the phenomenon of action force in the mind: a mental force that is exerted on (as impulsive act-urge) and by (as striving) its owner. After all, since the force in striving derives in toto from the impulsive urge that finds expression therein, it is perhaps the one quota of mental energy in different forms. Now ‘the will’ is in either of these senses generally speaking an ego-affirmative phenomenon: that is, it is manifestative of the distinctive individual personality with its distinctive systems of beliefs, desires, and values. Meanwhile there is a third and broader sense of ‘will’ which, while retaining the link with mental force, sheds that with individuality; and here I mean, a natural and instinctive force towards life, whether of individual identity or individual life or even species. This is the broad variety of ‘will’ already noted above. Then I think it is in some such sense that ‘will’ came to assume a position of increasing importance in the increasingly naturalistic conception of the mind that developed alongside man’s gathering power over nature. For these latter condition one another. As a new country can put one in touch with unsuspected sides of one’s nature – (say) one’s ‘Russia of the soul’ – so with this new relation to the environment. A door opened, as one might say. A fundamental truth about human nature came to light that could be revealed only when man’s concrete relations with the world had altered in a certain fundamental respect. Thus, at this particular point in history scientific advance released an additional human potential: the power to transform the natural scene and thereby create a sort of world of one’s own – apparently without limit. And so the native forces disclosed within the mind, aided by the guiding light of reason, seemed to promise to elevate mankind into a position from which

Introduction

9

it might preside from a height over the rest of nature. While recognising a kinship between self and nature, nineteenth-century (European, middleclass, etc.) man tended to see himself as rising above the natural domain: one foot in both worlds, so to say; and with the secret aspiration of elevating himself altogether out of the native animal condition. Rather as in the seventeenth century the Deity presided over the World and Mind over Body, so in many ways did these nineteenth-century men appear in their own eyes to relate to nature. Thus, the inegalities of the old order, which dies hard, and tends unconsciously to be repeated by its ‘liberating’ successors, were it seems projected in novel form, and the love affair with nature, so blissful in the early nineteenth century, because increasingly contaminated with power concerns. Now such an exploitative relation to nature paradoxically tended to de-naturalise as never before. Standing over the nature that he had once idealised, and over the most native stratum in his own natural nature that had come to the fore in that relation, self-deceptively conceiving of himself as ‘part of nature – and yet not’, the Victorians grew ‘out of touch’ with the primitive and ancient part of the mind as never before. A certain unreality, which finds its philosophy in the Absolute Idealism of Bradley, and is audible in Wagner’s swan-song ‘Parsifal’, that great hymn to sickness, as well as in the music of Bruckner and others, followed in the wake of this development. In this way there was effected a serious polarisation of human nature, in which intellect and fine feeling were impotent for loss of instinct (think of the suffering Hamlets of that day, J. Alfred Prufrock and Petroushka) and instinct brutish and coarse for loss of fine feeling (Apeneck Sweeney, The Moor). One has merely to remember the dramatic switch in the career of Picasso, from the etiolated decadence of the Blue and Rose periods to the first harsh works under the influence of African Art, or the strange opposition at the same time between the rarefied aestheticism of much of the literature (early Yeats, Huysmans, etc.) and the raw vitality of the painting of the Fauves (early Matisse, Vlaminck, etc.) to see that the natural unity between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ parts of the human mind was at this historical juncture seriously disrupted. This was after all the social scene that threw up those extremely florid hysterical phenomena from which Freud managed to fashion a concept that was peculiarly appropriate to the age, viz. Repression. In short, as the nineteenth century moved towards its close, the driving motives behind the creation of a limitlessly proliferating world of artefacts emerged as increasingly unwholesome. The earlier simple idealisation of the natural human psyche seemed decidely untenable, and so did the related idea that social misery stemmed exclusively from tyrannical and unnatural

10

Introduction

forces. All this signalled the demise of romanticism. An even broader sense of ‘Will’ seemed called for that would accommodate, not merely deep and native life-promoting mental drives, but equally deep and natural destructive and self-destructive forces. ‘The will’ as such could therefore hardly any longer be idealised, and natural illness and even natural evil tended to appear in naturalised conceptions of the human mind. Precisely this need for a further enlargement in the sense of ‘Will’, this unmistakable clouding over of once azure skies, is I suggest the movement out of and beyond romanticism. ‘We are all ill’, said Freud, somewhat as other ages have said that ‘we are all sinners’, at a time when the phenomenon of disease seemed to be of particular interest to Europeans. And it is worth remembering that Freudian theory set out in the 1890s from the recognition of psychic disease entities that Freud had learned from Charcot in Paris in 1885. Indeed, after a brief flirtation with the idealisation of the psychic natural, in which he supposed that neurotic misery derived entirely from civilisation and repression (the neurotic in himself being at worst merely ‘avid’), Freud soon encountered ‘original cruelty’ (in obsessionals) and in thereapeutic recalcitrance, and this movement in theory culminated in 1920 with the postulation of the Death Instinct and in 1925 with the centralisation of the phenomenon of anxiety. The contradictory forces in the mind, the ‘variance of the will with itself’ (Schopenhauer), denied idealistically by the early romantics and self-deceptively by the Victorians, returned with a vengeance. In a much more serious sense it became evident that human beings are, in entirety and with entirely fallible character, things of nature through and through. Such is the history of ‘The Will’ as conceived in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. (As an aside I would point out that, concerning the nature of evil, Beethoven was in a sense in advance of his time; he had no illusions on the matter; his intelligence and depth of nature shielded him from a mythology that was taking wing. Thus, the Satan of the early romantics was frequently conceived as a sort of misanthropic Byronic rebel, with the ruins of nobility within. For example, Puccini gave to Scarpia ‘a song to sing’, and Scarpia expressed his sentiments in music of great style and some beauty. By contrast, the only song Beethoven was prepared to grant Don Pizarro was a raging chaos, a wind-tunnel of hatred, a sort of ‘form of the bad’. In 1930 Freud marvelled, looking back at his earlier work, that he could at one time have disbelieved in the existence of a ‘non-libidinal cruelty’. What libidinality went into the creation of the Holocaust or Gulag?) In sum. Since the development and application of physics, mankind tended to see itself not merely as a reasoning spiritual entity akin to the

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Deity, but (as Nietzsche expressed it) ‘a piece of reality’, a force in the natural world like wave or storm (to which Byron likened himself ). That is, as a causally efficacious entity set down in physical nature, impelled by the deep natural mental force of Will. But since this entity has a nature of its own, a natural nature so to say, in mind as well as in body, it can function not just ‘rightly’ but also ‘wrongly’, and not merely socially or morally or logically, but – naturally! Thus, this animal can be in a state of ‘health’ or ‘sickness’, in mind as well as in body, in deed and even in thought and theory. A new test came into being, not only for the state of our bodies, but for the worth of theories and art works – of which by now we are understandably weary. Namely, one cast in terms of vitality or ‘health’. And such a device had great power in skillful hands. When Nietzsche spoke of the funereal odour pervading the works of Schopenhauer, brutal and onesided as the comment was, he aimed a telling blow. How could one claim of a philosophy that it was ‘unhealthy but true’? Or describe a work of art as ‘diseased yet great’? It is a significant fact about the fin de si`ecle that it produced artists who came as near as one can to disproving this absolutely inflexible rule. I am thinking of Housman and Mahler, both afflicted with a tendency to masochistic sentimentality, of Strindberg and his paranoidal claustrophobic marital hell-scapes, and Proust (nostalgic boa-constrictor digesting with immense slowness across three thousand pages every single detail of a vanished era – which (as with his beloved mama at nightfall) he would not let go!). Great artists, yet all to a degree trapped in a failing era. iii action as mediator This seems to me to explain why, with the growth of the physical sciences and a changing practical relation to the world, the impulsive instinctual side of human nature should have loomed large in nineteenth-century thought. But between the intensely positive moment in history when this first came to be, say around the time of the early romantics, and the twentieth century, this interest in the urgent forceful side of our nature shifted to a concern with the distinctive bodily phenomena in which these forces find overt expression in the physical environment, viz. physical action – an interest that remains with us to this day. Then what happened over that interval that swung the focus of concern away from the instinctual will to its public and bodily expression? And what is it about physical action that made it a centrally important theme for philosophers in the twentieth century? I think it is a manifestation of a significant change in the prevailing metaphysics, and indeed the general outlook of the age. For the entire

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gamut of meaning-giving items, the presumed absolutes supposedly lying behind the surface of things, at least as there and then conceived, had by a certain time come to appear suspect in the eyes of many. Thus: the Deity, the Absolute, Essences, Absolute Values, even the Causal Nexus; and in physics, Absolute Space and Time, and Infinite Divisibility (that other infinitude); even, in the arts, subject-matter, story-line, melody. This realm of absolutes, which seemed to confer an explanatory order upon the fragmentary elements of experience, cannot at the end of the nineteenth century have appeared to humanity as it did in earlier eras. It must have seemed either that such items were mythical, or else that the prevailing concepts of them had become grossly tainted, that some at least of these X’s had in the minds of men developed into oppressive and inaccessible Unknowns and that mankind was actually living in their shadow. In any case, there occurred a widespread rejection of those ultimates, generally in the name both of scepticism and of self-determination. An almost Parmenidean realm of Being tended to give way to an Heraclitean world of Becoming: the intelligible replaced by the senseless, the absolute by the relative, unity by multiplicity – and covert by overt. This happened in many fields. Thus, the hero of the painting became light rather than object, colour rather than light, colourpoint rather than colour-expanse, or spatial-aspect or mere paint or sheer unadorned canvas; the observation the centre-piece of physics, whether in Relativity Theory or Quantum Mechanics; and language in philosophy. An era of self-consciousness and doubt appeared in which those apparently unwholesome Ultimate ‘Realities’ were disowned in the name of the more certain reality of the immediately given. ‘The world put in brackets’, as the phenomenologists expressed it. Since that time the mediator items have tended to occupy the centre of the stage. This is evident in concerns as far apart as Relativity Theory, Phenomenology, Cubism, Philosophy of Language, Impressionism, and the ‘purely descriptive philosophy’ of the later Wittgenstein. It is not that God, Essence, Absolute Values, and the rest, were as such always rejected, but that in the eyes of many no acceptable concept of these items was available. Then what more natural than to study the mediator items themselves? It seemed the only certainly bona fide discipline available. In any case, since those mediatorial entities had once appeared to open out onto those absolutes, surely any way back to such realities, doubtless wondrously transformed in the process, must be through these novel inquiries. Thus, a kind of metaphysical epistemology was launched that took the form of a self-conscious scrutiny of the epistemological avenues that had once seemed to lead to those ultimates. This almost Humean metaphysic, in which natures and essences and substances

Introduction

13

were for the moment discounted or at best ‘put on ice’, in which mankind lives so to say on the outside of things, and presumably in some sense of himself, is with us still. How does this relate to action? Is action such a mediator item as words and paint and verifications and regularities? If so, what are the behindthe-scene realities that might perhaps shine through this mediatorial phenomenon? What hidden what is there that is, by the time of the twentieth century, so misconceived, captured in a concept that appears so laden with unacceptable myth, that we cannot but turn our attention instead onto physical action? I can think of three such. The mental, in general; and character, in particular; and meaning, perhaps pre-eminently. In each case bodily action is the prime evidential mediator for the item in question. Consider the mental first. Here we note a significant turning towards physical action. Thus, simple behaviourism sought to reduce psychological phenomena for the most part to active movements (pressures, stillnessses, etc.) in bodily extremities, while the neo-behaviourist enterprise of Wittgenstein attempted to establish the existence of non-contingent links between psychological phenomena and bodily and especially active bodily events. Then against what were those theories arraigned? It seems to me that they were opposed to a conception of the mental as an isolated domain of essentially unconnected and radically ‘private’ ‘objects’. That is, of ‘private’ phenomena that are akin to material objects in that they are supposedly self-subsistent, and which stand therefore in no binding need of manifesting their existence in bodily extremities in any way: metaphysical hermits! Thus the phenomena in the mind appeared in danger of getting significantly ‘out of touch’, first with other phenomena in the mind, but secondly and equally importantly both with the body and with the life that one leads amidst others and nature and the world generally. That is, of retiring into a kind of inviolate domain of the person, so to say the very private property of the personality, even (as Wittgenstein repeatedly observed) an occult and essentially inexplicable domain. In short, a mystification of the mental had come into being, at once ‘precious’ and ‘defensive’, in which modes of dependence and relatedness were grossly denied. Then the progressive reaction to this hoarding of interiority took the radical forms mentioned above. Either a crassly reductive revolutionary behaviourism in which these special and unquestionably more developed entities were so to say put to the sword and wiped out – leaving a bleak scene populated by little more than those bodily movements that we would characterise as active. Or the insights of Wittgenstein, who argued for the existence of a priori-given necessary links between mental phenomena and merely bodily

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Introduction

and especially active bodily events. For on investigation, the evidential relation between bodily act and interior phenomenon proved to be of a much tighter kind than sign or even symptom, and of quasi-logical force. While Wittgenstein sometimes overstated and in that way obscured his case, as when he described pains as neither ‘somethings’ nor ‘nothings’ (the truth being quite plainly that these possible immediate objects of the attention are somethings), and when he argued that we could not on our own name a new sensation nor reliably recall it (the truth being, that thanks to the vital Wittgensteinian ‘stage setting’ of language and the concept of sensation, we are in a position to accomplish what he claimed to be impossible) – his theory on this question is about as sound as any philosophical position can be. In any case, while Wittgenstein must be credited with more or less demonstrating that these ‘exterior’ evidential constraints hold right across the animal kingdom generally, and indeed across diverse life streams, he achieved this result mostly through showing how the phenomenon of self-consciousness depends upon an internalisation of a social and languageusing ‘form of life’. That is, upon the internalisation of certain institutions in which a special mode of physical action plays an essential part. Therefore two physically active mediatorial items, the language-using acts of an entire people and of the subject in particular, as well as the subject’s own physical acts more generally, play a vital role in his elucidation of the concepts of self-consciousness and of the mental. Something similar is found in Sartre’s account of character. Sartre not only had no truck with the noumenal self of Kantian theory, but little time for that sense of ‘character’ in which we invoke it as explanation of our own deeds, e.g. ‘I informed on him, because I was treacherous at the time.’ Such a supposed abrogation of freedom is supposedly ‘in bad faith’, a flight of the for-itself to the in-itself in the face of the ‘anguish of freedom’, and in any case no more than a re-description masquerading as an explanation. Sartre, at least in ‘Being and Nothingness’, believed in our capacity always to project a future that conferred a different meaning or interpretation upon our past than hitherto, and supposed that in this sense we are at all times making ourselves out of nothing. (‘I am not what I am and am what I am not’, as he expressed it.) This phenomenalism of the self, again curiously reminiscent of Hume, more or less dissolves the character, not into thoughts and sensations and willings as Hume with the self, but into an open-ended history of psychological phenomena and above all of actions. In the place of a character which necessitates, we are offered a history of deeds which while exerting a kind of pressure never constrains absolutely. This is the stuff of a radical and possibly even a frenetic freedom! In any

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case, Sartre is here setting himself against such a conception of the mind as would make of the character a destiny-shaper that stands above and behind our choices. Let me express this in different terms. What should we say is the meaning of a man’s life at any particular point in his personal history? Well, we are all of us at all times concerned to confer a coherent and in our eyes desirable character upon this phenomenon as a whole, and in this sense we are endlessly concerned with the fundamental enterprise of endowing our lives with unity, meaning, value. Then Sartre (in the 1940s) supposed that the only facts in this situation are a history of deeds that is such that it is always possible so to augment it that it acquires a significantly different interpretation, both now and as a whole. As Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘thinking is essentially the operating of signs’ seemed to empty the mind of its contents, so here in Sartre. No determining ‘thing’ to be found in the mind – no mental private property: in a sense, nothing ! That is, that all that really exists is an open-ended history of deeds that is susceptible of a provisional interpretation that is always liable to be revised. The meaning is in no sense ‘there’ in advance as one proceeds to live, ‘given’ already and merely waiting to be discovered. Instead, we are always actively fabricating whatever interim meaning our life may have by a certain time, and our freedom to do so is total and unqualified. As Sartre remarked of Henri Alleg, in relation to his heroic conduct during the Franco-Algerian conflict (and while conceding that Alleg was ‘a tough one’): ‘The victim saves us in making us discover, as he discovered himself, that we have the ability and the duty to undergo anything.’ (Stern and noble words. But true? I am reminded of the comment Hemingway is said to have made concerning his own art: ‘Anybody can write. It’s hell, but anyone can do it.’ This coming from the man who produced the most famous ‘protocol sentences’ of modern literature!) Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and use has much in common with the above. Thus, Wittgenstein repeatedly claimed that the world does not ‘force concepts upon us’. He believed that we were free to unite anything with anything in forming a concept, and that human nature and most especially human needs and purposes play a vital though unseen part in this process. In short, a constrained but nonetheless limitless freedom exists in concept formation, rather as a limitless freedom exists according to Sartre as we project our individual futures on the ground of a particular past. Then this supposed freedom from objective determinants in the world became the central element in Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and use. As no personal history and provisional character necessitates one’s personal

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Introduction

future and character, so no history of the use of a term necessitates any later sector of its history – as the ‘language-games’ purported to demonstrate. Thus, everywhere one looks one sees radical freedom! And atomism! The atomism evident in the piecemeal elements of ‘the use’, the freedom in the fact that there can be no such thing as a linguistic fate for a term. Just as no given character exists that can determine choice, so no essence or meaningentity can stand over language users and, independently of their needs and interests, dictate the later stages of a usage. A usage is like a human life in being essentially open-ended and open to novel developments. We are at all times according to Wittgenstein free to augment the use of a word as we please – and under no more serious constraints than those of utility, ease of communication, etc. The Wittgensteinian dissolution of meaning-entities and essences, which is closely akin to his dissolution of ‘private objects’ and to the Sartrean rejection of a given character, redirects our attention away from meaning onto the piecemeal open-ended elements of a usage. That is, onto a set of phenomena distributed across time, viz. the actual linguistic deeds of the members of a speech community. In other words, away from some supposed absolute objectivity that orders and determines the immediate mediator items, and onto the mediators themselves. (‘Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use’, was a slogan repeatedly affirmed by Wittgenstein.) In short, onto a vitally important class of bodily actions. Here meaning and essence come home to roost. Then despite the errors of ‘crass behaviourism’; despite Wittgenstein’s tendency to overstate his compelling case for the thesis that the psychological relates with quasi-logical force with bodily acts (etc.); despite the obscurities and errors in his doctrine of ‘You can say what you like provided . . .’ and those in Sartre’s account of freedom – it seems clear that the progressive path in philosophy is a line that passes through and beyond these theories. Those who were content to accept a doctrine of the absolute autonomy of the mental, were in all probability philosophical ‘reactionaries’ who felt no especial need to link inner with outer, character with deed, understanding with speech, conceiving of mental phenomena as ‘higher phenomena’ which ‘stood over’ the body and its acts rather as late nineteenth-century European man ‘stood over’ matter and ‘lesser breeds’ – losing a whole side of their nature in so doing. While those who wished to renew contact with the lost half, necessarily passing through a crisis of self-consciousness, helped to inaugurate a creative era in which a sceptical critique of certain putative absolutes occurred. Then it seems certain that any acceptable account of the mind, freedom, meaning, must incorporate the insights of this phase of the philosophy of human nature in which we

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investigate humanity from a standpoint that seems peculiarly appropriate to our present era: namely, from-the-outside-onto-the-outside-amidst-others. In other words, in which philosophers opted for a ‘given’ that consisted, neither of sense-data nor states of consciousness, but bodily actions set in a public and physical environment. That is, in which the superficial phenomenon of bodily action proves to be the royal road to anything worth the having. iv pragmatist solipsist ‘small ’ metaphysics Can the changes elaborated in section II shed light upon those just now recounted in III? Can we relate the mutation in the nineteenth-century conception of instinctual Will from pure and pristine force to something muddied and more conflicted, with estrangement from the absolutes and the shift towards mediators and most especially towards the mediator which interests us, viz. active bodily will? In section II, I tentatively suggested that the acquisition of great novel physical powers brought to the fore such psychic forces in the dominant social group of the time as to render impossible the romantic idealisation of instinctual Will. Above all, an unwholesome relentless pride that led to an exacerbation of mental repressive forces, estrangement from vital instinct, and in consequence a diminished sense of reality that managed to find metaphysical expression in a philosophy like the Absolute Idealism of Bradley. This was a mode of self-estrangement. After all, metaphysics occurs exclusively in the minds of men, and generally in men living close to significant historical movement. If the human exemplars of authority suffer a self-estrangement ‘from on high’, what more natural than that the Metaphysical Authorities themselves should drift out of reach of mankind? But it would be absurd to suppose that the cure for this condition lay in a revolutionary overthrow of all that those ‘Authorities’ claimed to represent, in a complete levelling of the land! It would in the circumstances amount to a sort of smash-and-grab raid upon authenticity! Holistic considerations ensure that remedial measures cannot be so localised. And is the precipitating historical situation simply to be conjured out of existence? And why in any case should we idealise the mental forces that would in fact be let loose? And why the array of concepts that would reflect that upsurge? The flight to the immediate physical given seems to lead to as unconvincing a brand of innocence as was Victorian moralising of valuing. What you might call ‘self-estrangement from below’. Those who turned away to the mediator items, with their ‘tough-minded’ interest in nothing but ‘the hard facts’, suffered from no such illusions.

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These sceptical spirits had no further interest in authoritative absolutes of any kind, whether ‘dark’ divinities or loftier arbiters of rectitude. And yet even though freed of grand metaphysical pretensions, and of that conceptual presumptuousness – evident in the physical theories of that era – which had assumed that infinity and infinitesimal, and the apparent conceptual distinctness of space, time, matter, and energy, must find objective physical realisation – this novel mental posture nevertheless expressed a new albeit less opulent and ambitious metaphysics. Not the metaphysics of Absolute Idealism, but a pragmatically oriented metaphysics of solipsist idealism. The pretence of ‘metaphysical immunity’ was after all a mere pretence. Then once again the arts provide a valuable lead. For if cubism and impressionism were art forms to match the operationalist phenomenalistic idealism of logical positivism, the lonely ‘I’ of the literature of the time, as well as the innumerable sceptical, solitary and highly capable ‘private eyes’ (sic!) of detective novels, expressed that pragmatic solipsism which was never very far away – and gave renewed signficance to the problem of other minds, of psychological privacy, and communicability. Thus, radical methodological scepticism, with its eschewal of the meaning-giving absolutes and espousal of mediators, brought its own troubles with it. Notably, of where to call a halt in the headlong sceptical retreat into self and consciousness. In short, of precisely what to count amongst ‘the given’ – always an issue of the first importance, and by no means unproblematic in this case – and precisely why so to count it. Then whereas Heidegger bluntly and with some insight designated being-in-the-world and being-with-others as ‘equiprimordial’, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language (including his earlier views on the limits of thought) provided an impressive rationale for opting for a ‘given’ that encompassed communal language-using ‘forms of life’ set in a public environment. In any case, as those absolutes moved off into exile, they threatened to take with them, not just other minds, but physical objects, indeed the very world itself. For an idealism that is denuded of Deity and Absolute and Thing-in-itself stands a good chance of approximating to a form of universal nihilism. Is not the particular fascination of Hume that he hovers on the edge of just such a brink? And was he not the patron saint of the era under consideration? Thus, thrown back upon mediators and inwards onto the self, the problem of other minds loomed large and there was serious need of marking out an intelligible and acceptable ‘given’. Then might it be that the solution to the problem lies in our own natures? Might not some property of the self provide us with access to such a ‘given’? May we not find salvation from radical doubt in some internally guaranteed sheet-anchor – such as

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an innate and necessary awareness of the reality of ‘the other’? For could it be the case that the self is to be internally defined by opposition and union with ‘the other’? But is the bond with other minds really the most fundamental property of our natures? Are we together before we are anything else? I think we shall see that even more fundamental than this elemental tie is our vitally founded connection with reality. It is true that the problem of ‘the given’ no longer urgently engages our interest, seeing that we most of us at the present time are as firmly convinced of the absolute autonomy and independence of the physical as we are of the absolute dependence of the mental-phenomenal upon the physical-phenomenal. Nonetheless, in so far as a problem of ‘the given’ can still arise, we would do better I suggest to pin our hopes upon our commitment to the world, which is I believe the ultimate concern of the mind and directly expressive of its vitality, rather than to our involvement in a specifically human world. Then we shall now see how these two fundamental phenomena, commitment to the world and vitality, find direct representation in the phenomenon of intentional bodily action. v the functional primacy of bodily act ion Inasmuch as animals are living objects, the vital processes that constitute the on-going of the phenomenon of life ensure that they are energy-consuming systems with needs, the satisfaction of which is a necessary condition of those same vital processes and indeed generally of the living state itself. Then those elemental needs characteristically find representation in animals in act-desires which find expression in purposive bodily action. And so the animal’s vitality ensures that it relates to its environment as consumertransformer, while its animality ensures that that relation is accomplished through desire-impelled bodily action which utilises the information given through awareness. Thus, the fruits of consciousness lead naturally to informed bodily action. And in a good sense the animal mind tends to divide in two: one half concerned with knowing and awareness, the other with action: a divide that is more total the simpler the animal. For the psychological phenomena that are essential potentialities of absolutely any animal, and therefore necessarily to be found natur in a normally functioning example of the simplest possible animal, say some super-simple insect, are: (A) sensation, perception, and information (at least); and (B) desire, intention, action. The first group of phenomena constituting the cognitiveawareness half of the mind, the second the willing-striving half. Now these few select phenomena are not there by chance, nor independently of one

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another. They go to form a causally bonded circle that passes through mind and environment. This primaeval circle, constituted out of the few necessary phenomena that are involved when the elemental transactions take place between the inner and outer domains, cannot be simplified any further. This is the shortest of possible ‘short lists’. Such a causally bonded few psychological items lie at the foundation of any animal consciousness of any kind. Desire Intention

Knowledge Perception Sensation

Act

Environmental effect

Significantly, the direction of psychological causality in this diagram is anti-clockwise, from inner to outer, from awareness to bodily action. One great half of this primaevally bare and simple mind tends to perpetuate the other half – which proceeds to transform the environment – which in turn repercusses within. Thus, the rudimentary role of the cognitive/awareness half must be to generate events in the willing half which utilise the cognitive/awareness contents of the knowing/awareness half, for all that is known in this primitive context is either acted upon or else treated with the practical response of indifference. Meanwhile, these informed willings play the role of putatively effecting satisfaction of desires that characteristically express needs, so that the function of these primordial willings must be to effect the satisfaction of need, upon which depend the perpetuation and flowering of life, whether of individual or species. In this simplest of all animals, all that happens, including consciousness itself, has the function of leading to such intentional actions as will advance life. Verificationist considerations bear this out. Let us for the moment make the contentious assumption that knowledge finds a place in the above elemental circle. Then what knowledge could we legitimately attribute to such a primitive creature? It is because intentional bodily actions stand evidentially between one and these knowings that one cannot in general attribute knowledge that significantly outstrips bodily action. Accordingly, the functional pre-eminence of bodily actions in this simplest of animals must be manifest in the fact that evidentially it calls the tune for all else in

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the mind. And this is no quirk of fate! – as if chance had somehow set up such an epistemological window between us and the creature’s mind. For we have just seen that the essential dependence of life upon the environment, which shows in one way with plants and another with bacteria, is in animals primarily manifest in deeds that relate it as consumer-transformer with the environment. In short, it has emerged that a purposive active interaction with the environment provides the rationale for the being of the engendering inner items. And that tells us why purposive active interaction with the environment stands evidentially between us and the inner world. Since the function of consciousness is to engender intentional action which utilises the genetically and experientially acquired knowledge that it makes possible, the evidential access to those generative inner phenomena must be through their natural end-product. Rather as we retrodict from living object to generative seed, so with purposive bodily action and inner life. Then if purposive bodily action that advances the life of the individual or species provides the functional rationale for the mind of this simplest animal, what is the function of the mind in a developed animal like man? Might it have a different function? Can such an item change function? A bodily organ can have one original function, gain a second, and shed the first. Could it be so with awareness? For what does awareness do for life in the rational? Or have we by now managed to transcend that primitive goal of our remote ancestors? Are our final concerns now – something else? Such as death? Heaven? ‘The good life’? Nothing at all? The choice is not large. Rather as Freudian libido retains its primal objects even as the resources of symbolism enable it to be deflected in ever widening circles of sublimation outwards into the world, so it seems to me that the developmentally original function of consciousness must be retained as it ramifies into wider horizons. Thus, despite the existence of aberrant phenomena like crime and disease which may well have no function, we have I suggest a right to regard civilisation and its rational accoutrements pretty much as we do the collectivist practices of various animal species. Namely, as serving a vital function. It seems that the natural goal of enhancing life is something that the minds of the healthy living cannot do without, even if the means adopted can take increasingly elevated form. It also seems that the means adopted for such a furtherance of life have in general to take the form of intentional action. Just as the primary and indeed essential function of the mouth is nourishment, despite its use in speech and in other ways, so the essential function of mental phenomena in all creatures is the generation of such purposive acts as further the life of animal, species, etc. This holds right

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across the board of active phenomena. For the class of bodily acts encompasses, not merely Hemingway-esque ‘left hooks’ and spare mutterings, but the writing of King Lear and – A Farewell to Arms! Somewhat as the process of thinking necessitates the concrete employment of mere words, be they English or Eskimo, so any enduring creation necessitates the use, not just of thought and imagination, but of something so utterly down to earth that it passes almost unnoticed: bodily action. The Ninth Symphony, which is perhaps a kind of universal that is incarnate in multitudinous scores, records, and memories, and necessarily incarnate in something as long as it is still a reality, owes its present existence to the mundane fact that a hand clutching a quill moved repeatedly across sheaves of paper. Only through such ‘earthy’ phenomena can the inner creative forces find the objectification that is their confirmation and consolidation. While it is true that Renoir in his later years sculpted by giving directions to assistants, it was after all merely a case of switching the site of action from one bodily organ to another. In a word, there are reasons for thinking that bodily action, and more specifically intentional bodily action that furthers life (of animal, swarm, species, etc.) is the functional goal of consciousness and indeed of the mind itself. Without making a fetish out of bodily action, any more than we should make of words a fetish when thought is the theme, we must remember that bodily actions are the necessary medium through which the life of animals replenishes and perpetuates itself. This seems to be equally true of the simplest non-rational and the most complex rational creatures. While an excessive concern with verification can lead to our misunderstanding the role of bodily action in animal life, it is worth noting that once again verificationist considerations lend their support to this account. For what kind of evidence may we adduce in the case of the rational for the presence in their minds of some specific psychological phenomenon at some particular time? Freud has either taught or reminded us that, most especially in the case of memory and desire, the evidential weight of an entire life, and according to Freud most especially its beginnings, may be brought to bear in the enterprise of eliciting the true content of any moment in the life of the mind. Like a flash of lightning that is gone before one can properly distinguish its features, or a limitlessly dense vision, it is almost as if many and perhaps all mental phenomena are to some extent subliminally perceived, so that the report of the moment is endlessly open to amendment at the hands of a context which, stretching as it does backwards into the dawn of life and forwards into an open-ended future, has no sharply defined limits. Then woe betide the psychological report that proves unassimilable by the life as a whole! Here the phenomenon of the lie is transcended by

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something broader and more mysterious. For the balance can never tip against the evidential weight of the life in its entirety. Then the possibility of disharmony between putative truth telling, and the life as a whole, gives the concept of the ‘Unconscious’ at the very least a foothold upon which it may stand. But what I want to emphasise at this point is that paramount amongst the evidences in the life as a whole is the history of one’s deeds, abstentions, and neglects, and most especially in regard to self and others: that is, choice in determinate human situations. In other words, a particular class of phenomena relating to human subjects, taking its place on a shared and public stage, in which the body and its actions play an indispensable part. This shows that the functional primacy of purposive bodily action remains a reality even in the case of a complicated rational creature like man. Life remains the aim of Life. It is of some significance that the functionally primary psychological phenomenon is, not just bodily action, but bodily action that successfully engages with the environment. This is so, for the following reason. It seems to me that we have need of a concept of mind that manages to avoid the distinctive failings of the interiorist conception of mind which drove men towards behaviourism, and that can simultaneously halt the slide in the direction of solipsism that followed in the wake of the sceptical retreat to the mediators of mind, freedom, etc. Earlier we noted that in a certain sense the mind is alive. This insight, which was given to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and impressively confirmed by the work of Freud, was not lost in the headlong rush to mediators. The progressive account of mind utilises this idea, conceives of the mind as the essential core part of a vital system, and represents it in the form adumbrated above. That is, as something which is endowed with the vital function of issuing in such informed active transactions with the environment as advance the cause of life (etc.). Then such a vitalist account is, I suggest, inconsistent with solipsism – on non-epistemological grounds. Since the functionally primary psychological phenomenon is a phenomenon that systematically interacts causally with the environment, this theory implies that any ‘given’ which includes one’s own mind is obliged to include in addition a sustaining environment. After all, causality can exist no other wise than concretely. While intentionality cannot ensure the existence of answering material objects to the phenomena of consciousness, it seems that the essentially vital character of mind guarantees the existence of a sustaining environment to which the mind adheres in systematic manner. Indeed, it is almost as if the sustaining environment were part of the vital system of which the mind is the essential core part: that is, as if the vital system actually broke its boundaries and

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encompassed what sustains it! While this is scarcely how matters lie, the environment is nonetheless an essential element of the systematic cycle, namely the ‘primaeval circle’ depicted above, into which the vital system of which the mind is the essential core part also essentially enters. This ties mind and world in the required way. And it demonstrates that any ‘given’ that includes one’s own mind must in addition encompass a sustaining environment. The relation between animal, mind, bodily action, and world, is evident in the following summary statement. Bodily action is a phenomenon whose typifying (purposive) instance provides the functional rationale for the very existence of the (mind) entity that forms the core essential part of a vital (animal) system that is systematically adhesive to a sustaining environment. This shows the particular way in which bodily action functions as a lifeline linking mind and world. It gives us some idea of the fundamental philosophical importance of this phenomenon. v i the priorit y of lif e and t he world over other mind s I suggested above that verificationist considerations support the theory that purposive bodily action is functionally primary amongst psychological phenomena. I must now justify my cautionary observation that an excessive concern with verificationist issues can lead to misunderstanding of the role of bodily action in animal life. What I have in mind is, that the solipsist tendencies of twentieth-century thought, and the resultant exacerbation of the problem of other minds, may cause us to exaggerate the epistemological significance of the fact that psychological phenomena generally manifest their presence in bodily action. The fact that they tend to cause phenomena that are accessible and intelligible to the consciousness of others may be emphasised, while that they tend to cause phenomena that advance the processes of life may be disregarded. Whereas in my opinion the fundamental emphasis should be placed upon the latter rather than the former property of psychologicality. That is, upon the natural function, the natural vital function of animal mind, which is before all else the production of such consumer-transformer interactive phenomena as advance the cause of the life of creature, species, etc., and is not to be placed upon its epistemological effects in or availability for the minds of others. Fundamentally important as are the cognitive relations between living creatures, they pale in significance before the most elemental of all, viz. that active relation with the world that fuels life. Before we are predators, prey, lovers, parents,

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suckling infants, let alone fellow citizens, we are living creatures actively embedded in the world. The argument for this view sets out from the fact that behaviourism and/or its surrogates has been treated with the utmost seriousness by contemporary philosophers. Why so? What is the source of its appeal? Why take an -ism of bodily action seriously? Surely, one supposes, bearing in mind the plethora of theories that reduce ‘outwards’ to the third-person evidence, because it is an -ism of the evidence available to a third-person other. Yet why attach such importance to that? Surely, one thinks, remembering the insights of Wittgenstein, because the phenomenon of self-consciousness internally depends upon an awareness of the evidential outer face which psychological phenomena present to other minds. How could I know that this psychological X that nags away in my mind is thirst, if I did not know it was the kind of thing that tended to cause acts of drinking? And so one naturally comes by the idea that the primary significance of the expressive relation holding between psychological phenomena and bodily action lies in the supposed fact that the epistemological attunement of animal mind to animal mind depends upon that relation, and epistemological attunement is essential to animality. Thus, there is a tendency to assume that it is an a priori necessary feature of animality itself and not merely of selfconscious animality, that it be a potential epistemological ‘reader’ of the minds of other animals. The particular force of behaviourism, the reason it has much to contribute to philosophy, the sense in which it may be said to be affirming an important truth, is presumed to reside in the fact that without the expressive relation between psychological ‘inner’ and active bodily ‘outer’, the supposed epistemological attunement between animals could not be realised. Such a theory of the nature of the mind is thought to put solipsism, once and for all, firmly in its place. I think this account seriously mistaken. In our haste to outlaw solipsism and link each consciousness inextricably with its fellows, in our anxiety to break out of the philosophical solitude that threatens with the sceptical withdrawal to the mediators of immediate consciousness, we neglect the fundamental claims of life and succumb simultaneously to a form of methodological egocentricity. A word about this last. It seems to me evident that we are here approaching the phenomenon of consciousness through that of self-consciousness. This is ill-advised. To be sure, the selfconscious and the unself-conscious are, in the very same sense, conscious. But self-consciousness exhibits peculiarities that cannot be extrapolated to all varieties of consciousness. Above all, its necessary sociality (as one might call it). Thus, we know from the highly diverse considerations advanced by

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Hegel, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Freud, that self-consciousness is in some important sense actually constituted out of an awareness of ‘the other’. Better expressed, the possession of the concept of ‘another than me’ is a necessary and constitutive condition of self-consciousness. Indeed, it may even be that the actual sometime empirical existence of others is equally a necessary, though not of course a constitutive, condition. In any case, these requirements are two, and they are not to be confused; and there can be little doubt about the validity of the first requirement. The possession of the concept of ‘the other’ is as innate and essential to the self-conscious condition as is awareness of the reality of time and cause. The seeds are in us and merely awaiting their appointed soil. In this respect concepts as a whole divide into two groups, into the probably a posteriori- and the necessarily a priori-given. Whereas the concept of electricity was concocted to explain an array of phenomena, the concept of ‘another than me’ could no more be fabricated as part of an hypothesis to explain the movements of other animals than could an individual conjure out of his head the concept of the past in order to explain fossils, memory, the state of things generally. In a word, the possession of the concept of ‘the other’ is constitutively essential to the brand of consciousness that we all of us enjoy. Then egocentrically taking ourselves as model, we argue from the necessary sociality of self-consciousness to the necessary epistemological attunement of consciousnesses as such. It is along this particular route that we arrive at the view that animality as such is necessarily epistemologically ‘on the ready’ for others. To see how this argument is at fault, it will help to consider both actual and logically possible states of affairs. Now it is certainly a fundamental characteristic of any known animal that it is innately epistemologically attuned to the minds of others. Sexuality most of all, but also the general blood-thirstiness of a great half of the whole tribe of animals, suffices to ensure as much. This implies that all animals react, not just differently to animals than to other objects in the environment, but quite specially differently. Namely, so as to manifest a capacity to detect psychological states in others; which is to say, actually to know of such phenomena as impending attack or present fear. To be sure, these psychological phenomena may be a limited few and peculiar to the species under consideration, and depend amongst other things upon the complexity of the animal and upon whether it is group-oriented (like horse or bee) or a ‘solitary’ (like the tiger). Even dedicated ‘solitaries’ like tigers are epistemologically sensitive to a few psychological states in others, e.g. sexual arousal in a mate. Nevertheless, solitude can, theoretically speaking, wax far more extreme

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and reach almost transcendent proportions. For one can I suggest imagine ‘super solitaries’ who lacked the capacity, even most radically the forever teachability, to detect any psychological state in anything ever: a power that might be as remote from those beasts as is flight from pigs or mercy from sharks. That is, creatures whose behavioural response to other animals was no more specialised than, say, its reactions to largish objects that sometimes moved. These animals would in a way be as solitary as trees. Such a supposition is in no conflict with the concept of animality. We can easily fill in the remaining details of a perfectly intelligible picture. Thus, we need merely to imagine that they perpetuate themselves in the manner of amoebas, that they feed upon vegetables, inhabit a setting populated by fellow vegetarians, etc. It seems certain that these plant-like creatures are a logical possibility. That suffices to demolish the theory that animality as such is epistemologically ‘attuned’ to others. Before I proceed to draw certain conclusions from this fact, a word about the relation between animality and the category of objects given to its consciousness. It seems to me that animality as such necessitates the capacity to detect, not necessarily individuated objects, but at least what one might call ‘the ways of the physical ’; which is to say, items such as position and solidity that are at once determinants of manipulative action and specifically the subject-matter of physics. But it appears to need no more. In particular, it does not require the capacity (‘attunement’) to recognise instances of animality and therefore any psychological state outside itself, which one might call an awareness of ‘the ways of the psychological ’; nor to recognise group mental phenomena like (say) panic or ‘the ways of the group’, a capacity which I shall here dub ‘togetherness’; nor what we have called ‘sociality’, meaning the possession of the (socially determined) concept of ‘another than me’ and thus of social ways. Absolutely none of these interpsychic connectives is essential to consciousness. On the other hand, all are necessities of self-consciousness. Yet even there a natural order of priorities exists which shows orientation to others to be rather less fundamental to our natures than some other traits. Thus, self-consciousness necessitates awareness of social ways (which only humans possess), of the ways of groups (which humans and apes have), of the ways of the psychological (which humans, apes, and tigers, but not ‘super solitaries’ have), and of the ways of the physical (which all these creatures necessarily possess) – each category resting firmly on its successor category – so that man can be ‘social’ only because he is also ‘together’ ‘attuned’ and ‘physical’. We are material first, alive second, intentionally directed third, ‘attuned’ fourth, ‘together’ fifth, and only sixthly are we endowed with ‘sociality’ – even though the type of

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our consciousness is, albeit rudimentarily in the extreme at birth, from the very beginning self-conscious, and self-consciousness necessitates ‘sociality’. This seems to me to be the a priori-determinable order of dependencies in our nature. To resume the argument. We saw above that the property of ‘epistemological attunement’, the potential for detecting psychological states and the condition of animality, can be no part of the a priori-determinable essence of animality. Then the implications of this proposition are far-reaching. For the systematic expressive relation between psychological ‘inner’ and active bodily ‘outer’ phenomena, as well as the functional primacy of physical action, must remain every bit as much a reality with ‘super solitaries’ as with the (‘attuned’) animals of our planet. But if the functional primacy of physical action holds in the absence of ‘attunement’, the ultimate significance of the expressive relation between mind and action cannot be epistemological. Indeed, it must be the other way around, seeing that it is because of its functional role that physical action is evidence of the inner life. It is neither out of some supposedly essential epistemological ‘attunement’, or ‘togetherness’, or ‘sociality’, all of which are inessential to consciousness and dependent for their existence upon the functional properties of physical action. In a word, the final significance of the physical-act indicator of the inner life is not as epistemological indicator (as ‘criterion’, say), and resides rather in its vital function as fuelling device for vital processes (etc.). Epistemology takes second place to vitality. This alone suggests that the widespread sceptical withdrawal to the actmediators of mind, character, and meaning, cannot have been at the behest of a Cartesian-type cognitive project. And we know in any case that it arose from a dissatisfaction with the prevailing concepts of those three fundamentals of the human condition. More specifically, out of the need to give an account of those three spiritual dignitaries, which had ceased to wear a fully human face, in terms which suitably relate them with this immediately accessible ‘earthy’ phenomenon in which desire and vitality and concern with the world are openly manifest. Above all, to fit them intelligibly into a framwork in which life and the world are accorded the pride of place that is their due. Then if it is true that the wholesale eschewal of grand metaphysical absolutes tended to breed its own ‘small’ solipsist idealist metaphysics, we would have been better advised to halt this inward recessive drift through appeal to the vitality of the mind, which is an even more fundamental trait, than to its ‘sociality’. For the vitality of the mind ensures that it must be directed onto the world, not just intentionally but also causally, and hence concretely and successfully, and shows that any

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‘given’ that includes our own minds must be enlarged to include a sustaining environment. These truths emerged in the discussion towards the end of the last section, but I reiterate them at this point to underline their import. While positivist idealist solipsism is by now pretty much a dead duck, it is a matter of some moment that the functionally pre-eminent phenomenon in the mind is an event that is as such successfully directed onto and causally engaged with the world. To approach the mind through this ‘engaged’ and force-laden phenomenon is to see the mind as vital and essentially tied to reality. Herein lies the full significance of the shift towards the physical-act mediator of mind. It is true that a sceptical dissatisfaction with received concepts drove men to this expedient. Yet I see no contradiction in supposing that such a concern with such a phenomenon is at the same time an index of our changing metaphysical theory of Man. From a positive point of view, this development represents a new allegiance. It is because we think of man’s mind as vital and animal, and tied in its essence to a sustaining world, that we lay great emphasis at the present moment upon this familiar phenomenon. All else in the mind, including consciousness itself, is from such a point of view of merely secondary significance. vii dynamic epistemology With the concern with man as a natural object, bodily action looms larger and consciousness diminishes a little in one’s theory of human nature. From this angle, the whole willing side of man tends to overshadow consciousness. Now this has been a familiar enough point of view since 1800 or thereabouts. Schopenhauer thought of knowledge as originally and in fact as usually a ‘servant of the will’, and we know that Freud believed that consciousness developed out of, and was as such an agency for the expression of, that part of the mind that is entirely inhabited by mental forces that are closely akin to ‘will’ in its broadest sense. Meanwhile, I have just now advanced reasons for thinking that from a functional standpoint the active expression of the will provides the very rationale for the existence of knowledge and indeed of consciousness itself. But as we shall now see the will in addition in a certain sense actually invades the domain of consciousness and epistemology. This is so in two ways. The first is a direct manifestation of the essentially dynamic character of consciousness. For it is a logically necessary and sufficient condition of awareness of the World, which is to say of a proper wakefulness in the rational, which is to say of the obtaining of an overall rational state of mind, that the subject be in charge, rather as is a playwright

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of the world he creates as he assembles a drama, of the contents of his own mind. Dreaming precisely is the stream of consciousness when the guiding hands are taken off the reins controlling that phenomenon. The spontaneity that is of absolutely quintessential importance to thinking, mutates when a curbing mind no longer provides a direction for the mind to follow, into mere scattered expressiveness, so that the whole phenomenon becomes devoid of any higher purposive significance. Lacking the active control of a governing mind, the dream is a pure work of Nature. It is a kind of mental flower, and in any case no sort of intentional psychic artefact. But conversely the thinking process precisely is what happens to the dream when the mind comes under the guiding hand of its owner. It follows that one cannot apprehend reality unless one actively takes charge of one’s own mind. This is the treadmill we cannot get off so long as we are awake: bane of insomniacs – who experience it as an alien compulsion – perpetual treachery of self to self – since reason or inclination impel them one way even as the projecting mind’s desires push them in another – themselves impaled in the middle! Perhaps Sartre is right that we are ‘condemned to be free’, but there can be no doubt that the wakeful are pitchforked into mental activity by the mere state of their consciousness. (Then let them make a virtue out of such a necessity!) It is a neither rational nor irrational compulsion: a ‘must’ to act that is unconditional and absolute and unwittingly observed in all that one does. If it were otherwise and one could choose or refuse action as one chooses or refuses particular action, choice could determine consciousness and consciousness have a conscious mental cause that acted directly within and indeed depended for its efficacy on the obtaining of – consciousness. One would be able to be the conscious ground of one’s own consciousness! Because one cannot, this compulsion to be active neither obeys nor flies in the face of reason. The truth being, that the necessity to which one submits is that of infinite dependence. For even though psychotic states inevitably disturb the state of wakefulness, the phenomenon of wakefulness necessarily owes its existence to a bodily non-psychological cause, and it is from that non-psychological physical condition that the compulsion arises. Thinking is in this regard akin to and as dependent upon the body as the primaeval phenomenon of breathing. And yet it would show a lack of philosophical judgement to suppose that either the pure physicality of its origins or the compulsiveness with which it is undertaken conflict with rationality. As it is a fundamental mistake to oppose freedom and the compulsion exerted upon one by one’s judgement, so it is to oppose rationality and the compulsions that in such a case derive from the mere state of one’s flesh. After all, our nature encompasses both reason and matter.

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Then this unflagging internal dynamism makes its presence felt in all waking experiences. While awareness of the World requires the active government of our own minds, the phenomena one apprehends when conscious must in turn be experienced as standing in some specific dynamic relation to the particular mental activities that ensure consciousness and that consciousness ensures. As an example, the visual experiences of a racing driver necessarily bear the mark of the activity that absorbs him; and this situation, far from being an extreme and exceptional case, provides us with a pure model through which we may best comprehend the whole of our epistemological contact with the world. For the driver sees what he sees as ‘path to follow’ ‘obstacle to avoid’ ‘barrier one never crosses’ ‘practical irrelevancy’: his dynamic preoccupation streamlining or reducing everything in experience to its own terms of reference, sacrificing their specific identity to its own future: the more total his active absorption the more total that sacrifice. And yet somewhat as a grudging envy needs to be sensitive to the very quality that it denies in one and the same thought, so this dynamism needs to identify the type of these items that it simultaneously melts down for its self-developmental purposes. It is in such a way that a man’s visual experiences come to bear the stamp of the activities that are specifically chosen in compliance with the compulsive necessity of making some choice that is imposed by the bodily originated state of consciousness. Thrown into the deep end so to say by the mere fact of one’s brain’s being in such a condition that one is conscious, one has no choice but to engage in activity which cannot but impose a dynamic form upon all of one’s epistemological links with the world. To suppose it could be otherwise, to think that these internal activities might revolve in pure isolation in the mind, would be to endorse, not the benign differentiation of one mental function from another, but a vicious splitting that prises apart thought and awareness – inevitably damaging both in the process. Here we have one avenue through which the will invades the domain of epistemology. But there is another and even more important way in which it does, and in this respect bodily action plays for our present day epistemology a role not unlike that once alloted to sense-data. But first, I would like to advance a very general principle. Namely: that one knows according to one’s nature. That what one is determines how and indeed what one knows. Thus, if Freud is right instinct plays an indispensable role in our awareness of the world; for it is, he claimed, only because physical objects and situations have in the unconscious a particular and mostly desirable significance that we can know of them – so that nothing but an interested perceiving is possible. One sees the landscape with a cool objective

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intelligent eye that endows it with colour, shape, and depth, and at the very same time with an unconscious and interested gaze that sees in it some primal entity concerning which one cares – and it is only because of the latter phenomenon that the former can take shape. According to Freud, the ego-phenomenon of sense perception depends upon and reverberates with the undercurrent of phenomena in the other great instinctual part of the mind. Right or wrong this theory has the virtue of supposing that senseperception engages far more of our nature than our perceptual apparatus. And this surely is a great truth. Epistemology is not the isolated mental function one might at first think. For example, sight is a much more total embrace than the model of the camera suggests; depending upon sensation and therefore on the body, but also on past experience, on present beliefs, on concepts, memory, indeed upon sanity and reason; and, according to Freudian theory, one’s very instincts. So what the painter depicts is, far from being a special or luxury aesthetic angle, the literal truth of human visual experience. The humanisation of perception was no invention or product of the arts. On the contrary, it was precisely their source! Thus, one develops an epistemology suitable to one’s theory of man. Then what type of epistemology may we expect if our theory of human nature is of the kind that has come to the fore in modern times: namely, one that recognises the vitality of the mind, and the functional primacy of physical action? If this is what we take man to be, what and how may we expect him to know? I think we should expect physical action to figure in a fundamentally important way in our central epistemological transactions with the world, and its discoveries correspondingly to match. Instead of a calm inner pool in which the environment casts its instantaneous sensuous reflection, an epistemological image that finds an artistic analogue in the works of Claude and Vermeer, the world should in accord with this latter-day theory of man only gradually be disclosed to a desiring and physically acting agent. The miraculously informative sense of sight, beautifully appropriate to the outlook of the seventeenth century, inevitably declines in theoretical significance, while the sense of touch, seemingly of secondary importance but in actual fact the foundation stone of the entire sense-perceptual edifice, assumes a pre-eminence that is in harmony with its being the one sense that must obtain in any form of animal life. To suppose touch secondary to sight is, I suggest, to be deceived by the fact that sight is vastly the most used and useful of the senses – thanks above all to its formidable spatial organisation, which is in turn a product of the fact that the sense evolved to capture the enormous potential information available in the form of omnipresent linear electro-magnetic radiation. Accordingly,

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from a theoretical point of view the sense of touch comes into its own, together with its necessary other subliminal half – proprioception. And this is in harmony with the fact that naturalisation of the mind leads to a highlighting of the most ancient and primitive and essential mental phenomena. Now one implication of the pre-eminence of the sense of touch is, that since this sense inevitably utilises physical action, which in turn gives expression to act-desire, desire must in the final analysis lie at the foundation of sense perception and ultimately of awareness of the world. In general, the world takes shape only for a physically acting interested consciousness. Indeed, since sheer epistemology will never be the goal of those multifarious simple active projects, awareness of the world must depend upon desire for the world’s physical contents. Let me express this a little differently. My suggestion is, that the original link between will and knowledge, in which knowledge has the function of generating bodily action that advances the cause of Life, is re-capitulated in the first epistemological encounter between animal and world. That is, that the naturally strong link between epistemophilic achievement and bodily action, becomes all the stronger the simpler the animal concerned and the earlier the phase of its epistemological development. Entering existence so to say from a kind of void and equipped with little, driven willy-nilly if he can stand it out onto the unique stage upon which he is to enact his life, it is only through actively subjecting himself to life’s testing situations that the contents of the world can take shape for an animal and the particular furnishings of its own mind develop into being. In this sense, absolute security signifies absolute oblivion. ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain’ holds of the very world itself. This is evident in the most everyday situations. Thus, it is because a two-year-old child wished to follow the wall of his house as far as it would take him, that he can when he finally circumambulates the building discover that it is an enclosed thing of a certain size. A landmark comes forward and separates itself out of the epistemological emptiness in which the child finds itself suspended: the world and his individual self simultaneously crystallising that fraction more. Such a state of affairs typifies the condition of early childhood and early animality generally. And once again verificationist considerations lend their support to one’s interpretation, for the simpler the animal the more we discover its cognitive states through interpreting its publicly accessible physical deeds. And so while sight and passive experience play an important part in the first epistemological encounter with the world, it seems that it is above all the physical actions of the very young that map their environs. The more ambitious these interested active bodily transactions with the environment,

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the more extensive their ‘personal map’ and the wider their world. This map, far from being the goal of those countless projects, is a sort of epistemological residue of one’s active history. It is a map that is at once practical and unified and developing, and it is constituted out of the array of places that occur as internal object of the intentions corresponding to an array of practical capacities – a hill becoming ‘where we can find apples’, a road ‘the way to Z’s’, a river path ‘the long way to Z’s’. While a map object could be assembled from these knowings, such a thing is neither needed nor used nor even usable in our very first dealings with the environment. In sum, even though sensation is a necessary ingredient of the situation in which one comes mentally to structure one’s environment, the fundamental relation is bodily active and therefore interested and founded upon desire. As Heidegger observed, for the most part man is ‘fascinated by the world’. A dynamic epistemology replaces that in which in cool disinterested manner one puts together, rather as one might the pieces of a jig-saw, or photographs in an album, a world out of sense-data. Whereas one might have thought that desire would obfuscate one’s epistemological transactions with the world, somewhat as it is inimical to rationality in belief formation, it proves if anything to be the other way around. Nothing interferes with the process of coming to know the world more than apathy. Thus, the disinterested visual model of sense-perception which so appealed in the seventeenth century, gives way to one in which a great deal of our nature, with bodily action in the ascendant and desire underneath the lot, determines what and how we know. viii will and act ion What can we say about the phenomenon of willing? To begin, we note that its very existence is a contentious matter, and its relation to action problematic. And yet there can I think be little doubt about its reality. Then I would like at this point to shed a little light upon its essential nature. Thus, if I were asked for a summary characterisation of this familiar yet mysterious item, I would offer the following. ‘Willing is spirit in motion.’ But this obscure and seemingly pretentious sentence looks even darker than the phenomenon it was designed to illuminate, and the reader – echoing Byron’s comment on Coleridge’s practice of ‘explaining metaphysics to the nation’ – might understandably protest: ‘I wish he would explain his explanation!’ I believe I can go some way towards mollifying this complaint. Consider the peculiarities of act-desire (‘urge’, ‘impulse’, ‘feeling impelled to act’, etc.). As these synonyms suggest, this phenomenon is

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closely akin to a force. For it is quantitatively variable, it acts uniquely upon substances (viz. upon its animal owner), continuously tending to generate therein one unique psychological phenomenon (viz. willing) that counts uniquely as its expression, and does so immediately and of its very nature. These several features justify the comparison between act-desire and force. But they also suggest the slogan: ‘Willing is spirit in motion’, taking ‘motion’ in the natural though figurative sense of ‘going before’ or ‘giving way before’ or ‘giving expression to’ a force. And yet why should one have to resort to such a term as ‘motion’? The justification lies, first in the force-like character of act-desire, and secondly in the fact that willing counts as the unique expression of that quasi-force rather as does motion to impressed physical force. Then why ‘spirit’? Is that not just pretentious verbiage? I opt for this word for two reasons. First, in that the force cause is a mental phenomenon, the effect likewise a mental phenomenon, and the causal relation both immediate and immediately ‘given’, and thus confined within the mind: that is, because the desire force acts entirely within the psychological domain. Then why not rather say that ‘willing is the mind in motion’? This question brings to light a second reason for preferring the word ‘spirit’ (and simultaneously strengthens the case for likening desire to force), a reason which is a justification of the claim that act-desire acts only upon substances. Thus, this mental force is applied, not to phenomena in the mind (for it is the man, not some phenomenon, that ‘feels impelled to act’), not to the mind itself (for it is he, and not his mind, that ‘feels impelled to act’) – but to he himself. After all, the man and not the mind is a substance, and is in any case uniquely the bearer of the phenomenon of will. Then why not just say that ‘willing is the man in motion’? Clearly, because this fails to rule out the possibility that we are speaking of the man qua physical entity and of motion in its literal physical sense (for it is he, and not his body, that wills). Then why not say that ‘willing is the man qua owner of consciousness in motion’? While this formulation is acceptable, full justice cannot be seen to be done here to the fact that the effect of the mental force is itself a mental phenomenon. Because I wish to say that it is ‘he’, but in such a way that it is not inter-substitutable with ‘his body’ or ‘his mind’, though it is with ‘he qua owner of a mind’; and because the whole transaction takes place in the domain of the psychological; I opt for the word ‘spirit’. Why not? While it is a little too ‘spiritual’ for my requirements, I know of no other word that brings together these several characteristics. In sum: the one and only mental force that can find expression in the domain of the psychological, which is to say act-desire, acts immediately

36

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and therefore without representational mediation upon its substance owner, finding its unique expression in willing. Willing precisely is the unique phenomenon of ‘going before’ a mental force in the mental domain. Nothing else matches this specification. This is at once the justification and the use of my slogan definition. So much for the moment for willing. But what of ‘action’? Is not that even more than ‘willing’ – whose very existence is after all in the eyes of some seriously questionable – even more obviously our theme? Well, I accept that the concept of ‘will’ is contentious as ‘action’ is not (though only of latter years and less as time passes), and that the distinction and close relation between these concepts is a central topic in the ensuing inquiry. But I can hardly enter into that at this point. Instead I can at best throw out a few slogans and principles in an attempt to capture something of the distinctive character of these phenomena before I embark upon a more detailed approach to the problems they present. For it is I think desirable, as we commence the enterprise, that we scrape some of the barnacles off these too familiar yet puzzling phenomena and manage to see them afresh. Then it is with such aims in mind that I offer a companion slogan, now for the phenomenon of action. What is action? While willing looks to be a psychological phenomenon, what are we to say of familiar events like opening a door or starting a car? Leaving aside their relation to the will, which is surely intimate in the extreme, the following at least seems clear. Namely, that while action is unlikely to be a mode of causation, it must be closely akin to causation, as it were its ontologically elevated reflection (its ontological ‘higher octave’ so to speak). Then we might attempt to capture the essence of this phenomenon in the following way. When action occurs it is clear that causation is instantiated. Thus, an active bodily movement is an event with a particular causal history. Yet what is so special about this causation? Not just that the effect proceeds from the man, but that it comes from his mind. More, not just from any old phenomenon in his mind, but from such a phenomenon, namely the desire force that acts uniquely upon him, and in such a way, namely through the mechanism which it swings like a charm into play, that the agent can in going before this force and thereby causing the event he actively effects, feel that he himself is in this causing by an item in his mind specifically represented. He can identify with this example of causation by himself. Then in the light of these facts a second slogan recommends itself. Namely: ‘Action is causation from the mind as the self’s centre.’ Whereupon conjoining the two slogans, we capture something of the essence of action in the following statement. When action occurs ‘the

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37

spirit moves before a mental force’, and does so in such a manner that ‘the spirit generates’ in a causal transaction with which the agent can feel identified – the very mind of the agent expanding as it were beyond its natural confines out into the world at large. Of course this characterisation is absurdly general and leaves all specificity to be worked into the account. Nonetheless, a variety of considerations, specific and otherwise, lead me to offer it as a quick summary character sketch of the central or leading figure of the ensuing philosophical narrative. But is act-desire the only mental force? Are there no other ‘urges’, ‘impulses’, ‘feeling oneself impelled to – ’ ? There are indeed. Notably, the urge to laugh. However, this is an inactive urge. For since laughter necessarily is never rational, and therefore necessary never intentional, laughter as such is inactive, and the urge to laugh not an act-desire. When this phenomenon overtakes one, there is no striving to bring about those familiar convulsive movements and brays, even though the impulse may carry one forwards as on a wave; there is no willing: nothing so strenuous. For laughter gushes up from the depths of the mind as lava from the earth’s depths, supercharged with an energic life of its own, triggered into being it may on occasion perhaps be by a phenomenon of great subtlety yet at best only triggered. This irresponsible so to say demonic force, never very noteworthy for its kindness, has no truck with reason and its constraints. While it frequently condescends to put reason to use, it invariably refuses to submit to its rule, for laughter knows nothing of postponement and is expressive of absolutely no purpose. Atavistic and sophisticated at one and the same time it can in a certain sense be, yet strictly speaking the phenomenon is without meaning, for even the most complicated laugh is no more than a naturalistic response-to rather than a designated representative-of meaningful interior phenomena. This is why laughter falls only inessentially under object-specific re-descriptions that reveal those higher origins (e.g. ‘laughing at X’). In itself, this phenomenon is a primitive reaction. And wears an appropriately primitive visage. Now the urge to laugh expresses itself in the body and never in the mind, however distinctive the experience-of and the relief in giving vent to laughter. This means that the earlier slogan-definition of willing as the unique movement of the spirit before a mental force, remains unscathed. For it should be remembered that in the case of action we are specifically concerned with act-desire and its active expression. Then that active expression has a very important causal property which enables me to expand my summary characterisation of will and action. I have in mind the fact that

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will and action are necessarily infinitely causally responsive to the intention, and hence also to control and reason and value. Accordingly, I offer the following final characterisation of the phenomena of will and action. When act-desire expresses itself it does so in the manner of a force, acting on ‘I’ ‘He’ directly and without representative mediation of mind or body, in a unique psychological expression phenomenon, ‘spirit in motion’, that is instantaneously responsive to intention and therefore to the agent’s judgement, reason, values; and through this special phenomenon the self manages in its deeds to causally impinge upon the scene in a producing with which it can identify. No doubt this capacity for identification is closely related to the singular fact that the very phenomenon before which the self can in its own mind ‘go before’ is a phenomenon that is itself susceptible to the general efficacy of the distinctive values and judgements generally of the very self that is ‘going before’! Hence the peculiar experience of self-causation when we will, an experience that must surely lie at the bottom of the feeling that we are constantly experiencing our own freedom. It is precisely this feature of action which determines our wish to say of action, that it is the one phenomenon that is such that its happening in one necessarily never is its happening to one. Thus action has the potential for being an event vessel for reason. Then this is how it comes about that the expression of act-desire is a phenomenon with which the subject can identify. Because his individual system of beliefs and values can in the peculiarly direct and projectively regular manner available in bodily action make their presence felt in the world, a man can feel that he himself as a distinctive entity is likewise making his presence directly felt in the world. He can legitimately feel that he is represented in this event – as not in his sweatings and blushings and not even in his laughs. Therefore bodily action is par excellence a phenomenon of individuation. It is pre-eminently that through which the individuality of man finds objectification. Think of the mark left to this day on the body and mind of France by that incarnation of ego-ism, Napoleon! Indeed, it is uniquely through bodily action that men have an opportunity to alter the world in ways which confirm and actually consolidate their individuality. The work of man is more than evidence, more even than decisive proof, of individual endowments. Work is the very process whereby an inner potential develops into a reality. Thus, it is not crude verificationism that makes us say that Mozart without his works simply could not have been the man he was. There can be no substitute for deeds if one is actually to achieve full individuation. Hence it is that in speaking of a ‘strong will’ we mean, not just desires with the strength of torrents, but powerful act-desires and

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a personality strong enough to engender, sustain, and express such desires, in deeds that are in favoured cases the very processes of individuation. Hence too the link with the era, romanticism. For if man has the potential for harnessing limitless power without, and as a correlative potentially limitless power within, and if the active expression of those forces offers the prospect of ego-consolidation as limitless as they themselves, the stage seems set for the Man-God of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thinking of some of the larger-than-life figures that lived through that highly imperfect and wonderful era, it looks as if the theory cannot be pure moonshine. ix intentional action This capacity on the part of bodily action specifically to represent its authoragent in the physical environment depends in part upon the fact that the phenomenon is poised uniquely on the threshold of mind and body. Now certain other psychological phenomena manage closely to unite mind with body. Notably ‘affect’: whether an emotion-‘affect’ like rage; or a cognitive-‘affect’, such as astonishment; or mood-‘affect’ like depression; or mere anxiety or amusement or excitement or shock. All these phenomena have characteristic physiognomies and generally find bodily expression. Pre-eminent amongst those bodily expressions are the varieties of bodily action: the proximity of mind and body in ‘affect’ lies largely in its tendency to generate expressive bodily actions. And so ‘affect’ can be no sort of rival to bodily action in this respect, and in fact actually depends upon it. For mind and body are incomparably wedded in bodily action: a phenomenon that faces simultaneously inwards to an inner world and outwards to the environment. Poised as it is on the very edge of the mind-body divide, relating in regular almost instrument-like fashion to interior events like decisions, it is beautifully placed to act as representative of the mental realm within that of the physical. As courage may not quite be a moral quality and yet enables one to engage in defence of value, or as physical beauty is no spiritual quality but manages to provide a setting through which spiritual beauty can shine forth harmoniously (think of all those Madonnas and Apollos in all those galleries!), in comparable fashion this primitive psychological phenomenon provides a natural medium through which a higher realm may ‘alight’ in the midst of nature. Bodily action is uniquely either the very last and most outward-facing of the mind’s inhabitants, or else its very first outer representative (and exactly which we shall discover in the course of the ensuing discussion). It is a go-between

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or Hermes figure, a lightning conductor for the power of desire and the visions of the imagination operating under the control of judgement, a kind of tool that transmits the energy and meaningful projects of the mind out into the world at large. Now the special position of bodily action on the threshold dividing mind from physical nature, raises serious problems. We greatly need a satisfactory model with which to comprehend this situation. Thus, if we mind , then one begin by representing the mind–body divide so body feels that bodily action must lie just above, or just below, or somehow somewhere in the middle of the divide. But exactly how? One wonders mind

if it is like

mind action

body

; or

action body

; or

mind action body

? And

hardly knows what one is wondering! One wishes to know whether or not there may exist some real mental phenomenon that is of the type of willing. Or of the type of bodily action. Yet one suspects that one may be in danger of hypostatising as a psychological event what is in fact no more than a causal peculiarity of the active situation. That the correct model nor , not , but ! These may be, not fundamental questions, which conduct us into the heart of the mind-body problem, are not to be answered in a hurry. I shall not at this point anticipate my conclusions. Then the phenomenon that typifies bodily action is, not mere senseless unaware fidgeting, and not rational free action either, but purposive bodily action. After all, intentional action preceded free action on earth by hundreds of millions of years, being precisely as old as the animal condition itself. Now we have seen how intentional bodily action enables us so to alter the world that our distinctive values and judgements find replication and in some small measure enduring objectification. Through the agency of intentional action the domain of the mind, of reason and value, spreads into nature, acting as a sort of colonising force. Rather as a beaver ‘beaverises’ a river bend so a scene becomes ‘humanised’, throwing back an image that echoes something of the character of the engendering minds. Intelligible objects like sentences or signs or artefacts generally appear in the native landscape, taking root in and making use of the original matter of the scene, while standing at the same time in tightly knit bonds both amongst themselves and with the minds of their creators. Thanks to the mediation of the reliable go-between bodily action, the holistic intelligible structures pervading the mind spread out into the non-mental sector of the world, at each point co-extensive with a mind or group of minds. Thus, a

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dab of paint at one and the same instant unites intelligibly with an already existing coloured expanse on a canvas and expresses an intention in the mind of a painter agent, or a growing young cypress over a decade continues an avenue of cypresses and expresses the many intentions resident in the minds of a commune of farmers. Then since it is intentional bodily action that has such effects, the colonisation of the natural scene can be accomplished only with the assistance of the intention. For it is the function of the intention – at once controller-agency and meaning-conferrer – to trigger action into being and permit one’s beliefs thereby to impinge on the world. This causally potent source of meaning is the absolutely indispensable midwife for the coming into being of all intelligible non-mental objects in the world. Making good use of the ontological duplicity of bodily action, of the fact that in some sense it has simultaneous commitments in the inner and outer domains, the intention manages to bring together those two diverse realms in a causal meaningful relation. These properties of intentional action provide the rationale for the existence of action itself. As already noted, intentional action typifies action, and action exists in order that intentional action may be born. Nonetheless, we shall I think later see that, along with the phenomenon of intention, desire is an equally essential element in active situations. Whereas action as such gives expression to intention, so too do all actions express desire. And yet the tendency of latter years has been exclusively to study intention in action. Now quite apart from the fact that intentional action is the most important and the typifying species of the genus, there exist excellent reasons for such an emphasis. However, first things should come first. And the truth is, that this emphasis on intentional action has tended to obscure the real nature of – action! And the first task in any theory of action must precisely be a theory of – action! Then cogent as the considerations may be favouring investigation of purposive behaviour, there are reasons for thinking that the exclusive concern with the meaningful variety of action is symptomatic of a mental malaise. It seems to me that in an age endowed with so much impressive physical and intellectual intrumentation, certain polarising forces may be abroad. I mean, reductionist tendencies that pull both ‘downwards’ to the purely physical and ‘upwards’ to the intellect. Thus, deeply impressed by the proliferating domain of artefacts, the product of intention and so of intellect, there is a danger of scouring the mind clean of everything but intellection in one form or another. The entire region of man and mind that lies between body and intellect – the domain which is the ground of moral and artistic awareness and creation – is I suggest in some danger of being reduced out of the picture.

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Then my concern lies in a conservative direction. While recognising the functional primacy of the intentional bodily act, I wish to lay a particular emphasis upon the essential and therefore primitive characteristics of bodily action. Thus, the closeness of its tie with the body; and the nature of that tie; its psychologicality; its necessary link with intention; and its equally necessary link with desire. All this I hope to bring out in the course of the ensuing discussion. In fact, I want in Part III to bring fully into view the existence of a close kinship between bodily willing and that other concrete psychological phenomenon, perception. These two psychological phenomena, poised at input and output points of the mind, shielding it from the environment almost in the manner of a protective shell, are I believe in many respects birds of a feather. These concrete transactions with the environment are at their core senseless: after all, an infant needs no concepts to perceive pain or see the light, nor projects or concepts to kick its legs. Then whereas perception develops intrinsically with the passage of time, bodily willing does not. While bodily willing can be rational and support intentional interpretations, both it and the bodily act-desire that causes it are in themselves (or as I say, intrinsically) senseless. Accordingly, it must be their peculiar sensitivity to higher phenomena, rather than their own character, that might lead some people to construe them as more sophisticated than they actually are. This fact enables us to understand how it can be that these phenomena go back hundreds of millions of years in the very form we know today; for the bodily-act desirings and bodily willings of dinosaurs, unlike the perceivings and intendings and believings, are in themselves no more primitive and no different from our own. In this way we manage to link bodily action and act-desire with the remote past. Then since bodily actions give expression to act-desire, and those actdesires of the remote past were presumably the direct descendants of the basic needs upon which life depends, that must be to relate bodily action not just with the purposive intellectual side of man, but with the very drive to live itself! And so this work looks over its shoulder as it progresses. Not in a spirit of irrationalism, or from an idealisation of the natural, but simply because it seems to me essential that this very first property of action be conserved in our account. x dual aspecti sm The theory that I advance in this work is dual aspect in type. Yet just as we know little about a theory if we know it is a brand of materialism, so this tells us next to nothing. Materialism has been endorsed in a variety of

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forms, both in the past and very much in the present. All interest resides in that form. For it is in any case all but certain that none of these theories can be the final truth. Dualism can never be stamped out, and materialism will come again in a different guise. Not because philosophy is a matter of taste, but because these theories are at all stages of philosophical development in a certain sense underdescribed. (‘That is what should be understood by – ism’, being the form adopted by progressive insight.) Such theories surface at different times, in a context of recent beliefs about the world that breathes new life into their frame, with a ‘new look’ and novel determinations. For philosophy is a progressive inquiry and each great theory is as deep as the world itself. We could liken the history of philosophy on a question like the mind-body problem to the sinking of a number of mine shafts – heading in the direction of the absolute truth – situated so to say at the earth’s centre – yet essentially unreachable! One such is dualism and another is materialism. A third I suggest is dual aspectism. And it is because philosophy incorporates and not merely has its own history, that one can allow that these few major theories are permanently in business without lapsing into a trivial relativism. To trace out the history of any such theory is to delineate an ordered series of insights and confusions – from the vantage point of the present; but the comprehension of this development in thought must be an unalloyed insight – even though limited once again by one’s vantage point. Yet just as there is no such thing as an elementary question in philosophy, so there can be no discovery of their absolute truth. And as physics will never cure itself of problems, so philosophy will never have done with a single one of its truly philosophical questions. Accordingly, if I assert that I advance a dual aspect theory, I say as yet very little. Dual aspectism has appeared before and is with us today. It appeared in the seventeenth century in the work of Spinoza and in the nineteenth century with Schopenhauer, and has therefore a sufficiently noble lineage to account itself one of the chosen few serious mind-body theories (by contrast perhaps with epiphenomenalism); while in the present day Stuart Hampshire and Thomas Nagel have in their own distinctive and original way aligned themselves with the theory. Yet just as in literature it is not the bare plot that matters, so the worth of any of these theories must reside rather in the form it takes, in the reasons advanced for endorsing this ageless idea at this juncture in time. In the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries dual aspectism came into being because of the existence of tensions between such factors as science, theism, and idealism. Then there are reasons for thinking it might have an especial appeal today. On the one hand, the steadily accruing achievements of physics and its brilliantly

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successful application to the problem of Life in Molecular Biology, together with recent success in constructing artificial intelligences – create a climate of thought conducive to materialism. On the other hand, the increasing revulsion at crassly destructive and levelling reductionism, which is rapidly losing its charms along with its credibility – makes for a climate in which a programme of ontological conservation has great attractions. This leads to a situation in which one might expect either non-reductive materialist or dual aspect theories to spring into being. Naturally, one cannot in adopting such an historical perspective elevate oneself above the need for argument. And yet it is as well that we set this inquiry in a realistic perspective. Then a few words about the dual aspect theory advanced in this work. It is a dual aspect theory of bodily action and of absolutely nothing else. On the larger issues of materialism, dualism, and dual aspectism generally, I am intentionally silent. Much of what I say is consistent with any of these theories in some of their forms. To be sure, the specific conclusions reached concerning bodily action accord better with a general dual aspectism than with Cartesian dualism. But that is about all I wish to say on these more general issues. My conclusions are to that small degree in favour of the general theory, but only to that degree. Indeed, much of the intellectual spade work that follows is directed to more specific problems than the truth or not of a double aspect account of the bodily will. Thus, I attach great significance to determining the truth-value of volitionism. And the same holds of the precise relations between action, intention, and desire. And to the determination of the ontological status of the bodily will. The answers that I reach on these urgent problems do not obviously entail dual aspectism, even though they predispose one in that direction. Yet taken in conjunction with certain considerations of event identity, they lead me to a particular version of that theory which I shall in due course spell out. There is one issue of considerable importance which more than any other takes us to the heart of the problem of dual aspect action theory. I refer to the question of the constitution of bodily action. Indeed, in my opinion this is a matter of moment for additional reasons also: that is, for reasons other than the fact that the truth or falsity of dual aspect action theory depends largely upon the character of the make-up of physical action. I believe we shall find in this question a key to the mind-body problem: a key through the agency of bodily action. It is a key of a wholly different kind from the considerations advanced by latter-day materialists. In my opinion it enables us to put to philosophical use the fact that mind and body come closest together, and in a wholly overt mode, in the phenomenon of physical action. As I expressed it earlier, these two ontological domains are incomparably wedded in the

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phenomenon of physical action. Through this phenomenon we encounter a partial resolution of a major philosophical problem: a resolution through the agency of the very special character of physical action. So, at any rate, I believe, and attempt to demonstrate these claims in Part IV. x i will and limitation Some may think that, in naming this work ‘The Will’, I ally myself injudiciously with an outmoded concept, a left-over from dualist and idealist styles of thought. But as is I think apparent, I employ the word advisedly. I make use of it because I believe in the existence of the phenomenon it purports to designate. And I do so because the term emphasises the closeness of the tie between action and desire, evident in the very word ‘will’, a bond as intimate as that between action and intention. For great as is the relevance of the intention to action, it has latterly shown a tendency towards monopoly which should be resisted. And yet unquestionably the intention is of central importance in any adequate theory of the will. For the intention has the dual function of introducing the elements of control and significance into action. This double property assists in the characterisation of action, of saying what action is. Namely, not merely is action the expression-effect of act-desire and intention. Action is the expressioneffect of act-desire and intention which is absolutely immediately caused-by and stoppable-by intention: it is the essentially controllable and meaningreceptive expression of act-desire and intention. Here we have the main causal properties of action. Then while the intention is a causal agency in the production of action, it must in those transactions be efficacious in a quite different way from desire. It is efficacious somewhat as is the turning of a key in the opening of a door: that is, in removing the impediments to the efficacy of a thrust that acts altogether differently. Just as no key turning has without force ever caused a door to swing ajar, so no intention in the absence of will has ever caused a limb actively to move. In any satisfactory theory action has to retain its fundamental character as force-laden and energetic expression of mental thrust, and it would be to endorse a dictatorship of the intellect to permit the factors of control and significance to erase this primitive element from one’s theory: so to say, form and sway without content or subject. This tendency to monopoly is evident in the fact that, rather as ‘whisky’ and ‘scotch’ are in some circles used as if they were synonyms, so some people use ‘action’ more or less interchangeably with ‘intentional action’. As it stands this is a simple and merely linguistic error, and my espousal of ‘will’ should be seen as an attempt to correct the

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error. And yet a real issue lies behind this merely terminological difference. For no one would dispute that ‘intentional action’ designates a species of a wider phenomenal genus, viz. action. And the significance of this fact is that it indicates the need of a theory of action which allows for the existence of both intentional and unintentional actions. In recent times the concept of the will tends to have been either ignored or derided. In part this is because it has been associated with ‘hothouse’ versions of volitionism which, in the interests of a precious ‘privacy’, have been only too ready to promulgate schisms between mind and body. But mostly eschewal of the concept is a hangover from behaviourism. Thus, so far as the postulation of a whole set of internal items goes (‘will’, ‘sensedata’, etc.), one may say that philosophers are to this day chary of them. No longer on principle, but in practice these items tend to find themselves the object of a certain scepticism. Certainly, this may be fading. But if it is, it is not because a new introversionism is on the way. Rather, it is because an improbable extroversionism that led us outside of ourselves is on the wane, and the normal norm is reverting into place. This process has been aided by the reintroduction of causality into the mind, together with the consolidation of an ontology of events and the general decline of verificationism. These several factors make it virtually certain that the banished internal phenomena – a small band of phenomena mostly situated like sentinels at the input/output points at which the mind opens out onto the rest of the world – will sooner or later return. (They are almost all here in this work.) In any case, for relatively simple reasons, which will emerge in due course, I believe that whenever we act there occurs an event of the type of ‘act of the will’. A force-laden psychological item that is altogether different from a mode of consciousness: a sui generis irreducible psychological phenomenon that is literally as old as the hills. Indeed, it is only after one has reached this easily enough demonstrated conclusion that the serious labour gets under way. I mean, the attempt to provide an account of bodily action in terms of acts-of-the-will that does not involve one’s postulating an unacceptable mind-body divide. Accordingly, I shall in this work argue for the reality of the Will. And I hope to do so realistically. That necessitates my demonstrating how this phenomenon can be intelligibly fitted into its psycho-physical setting – the very intelligibility of the account adding force to the central argument (from illusion, etc.). And yet how to come by the relevant elements of its psychophysical contextual frame? And how to confer upon that array such an order as to reveal progressively the many-sided nature of the phenomenon of willing? I ask this question, because it seems to me that there is a natural

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order of development in philosophical inquiry: what might be termed the natural history of the question. That is, a developmental progression in which, even as one hearkens back to past positions once stormed and then subsequently abandoned, the full richness of the reality under investigation is gradually unrolled to view like a carpet. Vacillating as it advances, almost as if the victim of a ‘weak character’, incorporating its own history as it goes, it provides the missing past through which to understand our present. For in philosophy the concept of ‘the result’ has little use, and not just because of the provisional nature of one’s conclusions. No philosophical claim can be fully comprehended without being set in its developmental setting. The fallible ‘result’ of the moment can only properly be communicated to whoever has some idea of the path that led to that point. By contrast, Fermat’s ‘last theorem’, proved or unproved, is in itself fully comprehensible. You might say, a ‘result’ par excellence! We have already noted how philosophical development concerning any great question tends to proceed in parallel with comparable development on other metaphysical issues. Thus, Hume’s account of causation nicely reflects his theories of the self and of material objects. Then just as modern European Philosophy began with the splitting apart of consciousness and the physical world, the perspective being that of the individual for whom the ‘given’ consisted in the contents of his own mind, so it is natural that philosophy of the will should set out from a ‘given’ that is inward. And somewhat as the relation of mind to body was for Locke incomprehensible, voluntary motion being ‘unintelligible’ and no intelligible connection existing ‘betwixt sensation and the motion of insensible particles’, so first thoughts concerning the bodily will conceive of the phenomenon as ultimately inexplicable. It is not that we are committed to seventeenth-century dualism. Rather, first philosophical thoughts about bodily willing are I think dualist and find natural expression in the views of Descartes and Locke. Indeed, if anything the outlook of some of the early romantics is I suggest even closer to that expressed in those first philosophical conjectures. For while the relation of will to body was to Locke ‘inexplicable’ and to the Cartesians immediately dependent upon God, the ways of Nature and God were presumed nonetheless to be regular. But since many of the romantics were for the most part free of the natural constraint imposed by the Deity, and tended to think of themselves as harbouring untapped resources of will that might in principle be directed outwards, it was characteristic of them to conceive of the will not merely as a force whose power was inexplicable, but as subject to no intrinsic constraints. Then because this seems to me the most natural primitive philosophical conception of will, the style of

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thought of some of the early romantics comes closest to that expressed in those very first conjectures concerning the will. Hardly as a matter of principle, since the term ‘romantic’ ranges over a pretty heterogeneous field, but according to the spirit of the times. Then this is the point at which I begin my own speculations. That is, as I embark upon the process of tracing out what I take to be the natural history of the problem of the bodily will. We have, I suggest, reason to believe that this natural process of revelation will bring to light, and in an order that is likewise natural, the centrally important relations between the phenomenon of willing and the various psychological and physical phenomena which form its natural matrix. I mean: with bodily events of a muscular and neurological variety, with mental phenomena like expectation and awareness, and with those most relevant of all mental phenomena, desire and intention. And so I set out from the vantage point, from-within-to-without. Then first thoughts concerning the will tend to conceive of it as a kind of magical force emanating from the mind, an occult mental quasi-magnetic or electrical force which has its origin in an event of choice that is directed onto entities situated at a remove from the mind, manifesting its power in the most striking and doubtless the original case of ‘action at a distance’. For if the magical situation is one in which nature at large is immediately responsive to the mind, so that the full autonomy and distinctness of physical objects generally, and so also of the self, is improperly realised, and the ‘sense of reality’ and rationality of the practitioners not total; if it is that state of affairs in which objects of their nature inexplicably respond to mental events, rather as if distant objects were not wholly separate from one and could listen in to and hear and even obey one’s very thoughts (!), then I suggest that in converse manner the relation that obtains in willing can at first blush appear magical. Instead of saying that the magical is to be construed as an extension of willing, one might wish rather to say that willing should be understood as a localisation of the magical. So, at any rate, it seems to me. Wittgenstein remarked that we would liken the mind to a gas-filled bowl did we not feel foolish in doing so. Then it seems to me no less natural to think of the relation between (say) some decision event and a toe movement, not merely as a thing to marvel at, but as somehow or other breaking all the rules! as beyond the pale of reason! in a word, as akin to magic! A grossly false idea, no doubt, primitive even; but, I submit, entirely natural. ‘Philosophical repression’ may attempt to laugh it off, but such defensive thought tends to generate its own retributive punishment

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(what Freud called ‘the return of the repressed’). In any case, I shall take seriously this comparison between the will and a magical force. Realism enters the picture with two rather self-conscious and sceptical thoughts. One is, that the primitive idea of the will as a sort of inexplicable efficacious directed psychic force is to say the least obscure and in need of explanation; and the second more specific query is, whether there might not exist a priori-given limits to what can be willed. This latter question, with its evident commitment to reason and realism, goes right against the grain of the ‘romantic’ image of the will as an essentially free force limited by nothing more than the finitude of its own finite intensity. And there can be little doubt that the question puts its finger on a sore spot. Then it is for this reason that I commence this inquiry, aiming at one and the same moment to both embark from and go beyond the quasi-magical libertarian and interiorist conception of willing, by a consideration of the question of limits.

pa rt i

The limits of the will Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? Joseph Glanville (Quoted by Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Ligeia’)

chapter 1

The logical limits of the will

1. introduction Somehow there seem to be some kinds of changes which are due to the will, and some which are not, some which might be due to the will, and some that we feel sure never could. For example, arm rise is usually the work of the will, whereas digestion is not, and while ear movement might on occasion owe its existence to the will, the union of a sodium ion in one’s leg with a neighbouring chlorine ion is an event that could not conceivably be willed. In short, there seems to be a certain scope for the will, and simultaneously to be limits. If this is true, and there are such limits, of what character are those limits and where are they to be drawn? This is the question which I shall be discussing in this and the next three chapters. It is a question concerned both with the character and location of the boundaries within which we delimit the scope of the will. In the present chapter I hope to demonstrate the existence of two kinds of logical limits to the will. Thus it seems on the one hand that, amongst the phenomena which could not conceivably be willed, there exists a subclass in which the inconceivability is as strong as it could possibly be, viz. as strong as the entailment bond. That is, there exist phenomena which are such that it is logically impossible that they should be willed. It seems on the other hand that there exist phenomena which are such that it is logically impossible that they should ever be of the type, willings. In short, I shall argue that there are logical limits both to the will’s objects and to its extension. This latter claim is the simpler to demonstrate, and is considered first. 2. distin guishing ‘the willing of’ from ‘the willed’ (1) Here I should like briefly to set out a case for the existence of a distinction – demonstrated more decisively in chapter 12 – that is employed 53

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throughout the present chapter. Let us suppose that a basic act  of φmaking occurs. Then the claim is, that the concepts, act of φ-making and φ that is actively made, are to be distinguished, and so too are the phenomena themselves. For example, arm raisings are not the same thing as active arm rises. Expressed in the terminology of ‘will’: ‘the willing of ’ is to be distinguished from ‘the willed’. Before I can say what next I wish to say, I have need of the word ‘active’, understood as synonymous with the property of being an active ‘doing’. How best to explain this familiar term? At least by the method of example. Thus, kickings, talkings, listenings, tryings that succeed, tryings that fail, mental tryings and physical tryings, all rate as active phenomena, whereas achings, convulsings, hearings, do not. Accordingly, the ‘active’ may be singled out as the type of phenomenon one can desire, decide, choose, and above all intend to do. Armed with this term we are now in a position to lay before the reader a simple fact which strongly suggests that ‘the willing of ’ is one thing and ‘the willed’ another. Consider the phenomenon, trying. All tryings are active. Indeed, necessarily all tryings are active, and all tryings are surely necessarily active. That is, being active seems as if it is, not merely a necessary, but an essential trait of trying. For can any example of trying fall under a less ambitious heading that is not active? Can one so much as imagine a phenomenon that was indistinguishable from trying to remember or trying to move a limb that was not active? – that one could not engage in? – or desire and intend to do? I do not think so. What would be its type? It looks as if we have here a phenomenon in which being active is an essential trait. Indeed, it suggests to me that ‘active’ has only de re essentialist applications. (2) Let us assume then that being an active doing is a de re necessary property of trying. Then how could it be a de re necessary property of trying, and at the same time a merely contingent relational property of some other phenomena? Yet this is what we would have to accept if arm raisings are arm rises, i.e. if the act of φ-making is the φ that is made, i.e. if there is no event and conceptual distinction between ‘the willing of ’ and ‘the willed’. I think this implausible. For consider what we discover when we examine mental phenomena with will the theme. Looking through the mind – at listenings, tryings-to-remember, fightings-to-stay-awake, ratiocinative thinking, which are active and essentially so – and hearings, rememberings, wakings, thought-events, which are inactive and again essentially so – it is difficult to accept that activeness can be an inessential property of its mental bearer. It seems overwhelmingly likely that any mental phenomenon is

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either de re essentially active (such as listening) or de re essentially inactive (such as hearing). Indeed, that activeness and inactiveness simply are traits that can only be de re essential. Conjoining this claim with the considerations advanced in (1), we assemble a strong case for distinguishing ‘the willing of ’ from ‘the willed’. This distinction – which is more decisively demonstrated in chapter 12 – is utilised in what follows. 3. necessarily, no sensation is a willing (a) That is, while some sensations may be willed, none are willings In this present section I describe a logical limitation – not upon the will’s objects (i.e. upon what can be willed) – which is my ultimate concern – but upon the will’s extension (i.e. upon what can be a willing). As a first example of an a priori limit upon the will, I propose now to defend the thesis that no sensation can be a willing. If true, this constitutes a logical limit upon the will’s extension. Then this thesis is in the succeeding section 4 generalised to the wider claim: necessarily, the will-value of all psychological items is determined by their generic type, where will-values are construed as akin to truth-values and range across active/inactive, and ‘generic type’ is understood as the minimal unredescribed ‘sortal’ kind. This generalisation can be supplemented by the corollary: necessarily, all items of the same psychological type have the same will-value. Now since it is in all probability an essential trait of any psychological entity that it is of the generic type that it is, the following principles seem to hold in the mind: (A) The will-value of any item is an essential trait of that item. (B) The will-value of any item is a priori determined by its generic type. Indeed, it seems to me that these two principles hold universally, both within the mind and elsewhere – though this is a contentious claim which anticipates the arguments of chapter 12. Thus, it is an essential trait of all pains that they are not willings; and it is so, simply because they are pains. Equally: it is an essential trait of all swimmings that they are willings; and it is so, simply because they are swimmings. And of all sleepings we may say: necessarily, they are not willings; and it is so precisely because they are sleepings. But I must begin with a concrete example, and I have chosen the sensation for its simplicity and psychologicality. I propose to show that there exist a priori logical limits to the will’s extension by showing that necessarily no sensations are willings. Then to repeat: my claim is not there can be no act that is the bringing about of a sensation: that is, an act in which

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sensation plays the part played by bodily movement in basic action. It is a simpler claim, viz. that no instance of any sensation type is identical with any action. Alternatively, that there is no possible world in which some sensation individual and some act individual are identical. (b) The argument (1) The argument for rejecting the thesis that in some possible world some sensation individuals are identical with some act individuals, is built upon two claims. (α) Necessarily, all actions have immediate mental origins, and (β) necessarily, all sensations have immediate physical non-mental origins. I will consider them in turn, beginning with (α). At once we notice that (α) breaks up into two claims. They are: (α1) necessarily, all actions have a mental origin, and (α2) necessarily all actions have a mental origin that is immediate. Consider them in turn. (α1) Necessarily, all actions have a mental origin. This asserts that necessarily all acts give expression to some desire/urge/intention/decision/etc. Where might one look in search of counter-examples? Surely, if at all, it could only be when a stray and unnoticed act of the utmost triviality occurs: say, when one idly moves a finger during sleep. But if this event was the expression of no mental force whatsoever, all that can have happened was that the finger moved. Such an inactive characterisation is obligatory when the mind has nothing to do with the causation of a phenomenon. I conclude, necessarily all actions have mental origins. (α2) Necessarily, all acts have a mental origin that is immediate. That is, whenever there exists an act, necessarily there exists a mental origin O of that act which is such that there is no answer to the question: through causing what did O cause the act? Then the rejection of (α2) is tantamount to the supposition that O caused the act  through causing some intervening, distinct, physical, non-psychological phenomenon P. Let us consider a particular case, an act  of raising an arm. If the agent of  is aware of  and aware of it qua act – as seems certain, and bearing in mind that he must be mentalistically immediately aware of doing something or another, his awareness of  must surely be mentalistically immediate. But so too must be his awareness of the origin O of the act. And so also is his awareness of the fact that O caused the  of which he was immediately aware. But if the mental origin of the act  caused  through the mediation of some intervening, distinct, physical, non-psychological phenomenon P, how could he be mentalistically immediately aware of the causal relation? To repeat. He was mentalistically aware of O. But he was also mentalistically

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aware of something distinct from O: namely, of the active doing that O proceeded to cause. And, in addition, along with these two phenomena, of the causal relation between them. Then how could the latter awareness be mentalistically immediate if O and  were causally mediated by (say) an event in a tendon or joint? It is not possible. I conclude, that all actions have immediate mental origins. (2) Now let us consider the second half – the claim I named (β) – of the argument for the view that there is no possible world in which some sensation individual is identical with some act individual. (β): Necessarily, all sensations have immediate physical non-mental origins. When might one be inclined to question this claim? I can think of two possible situations: the seeming pain of an extreme hysteric, and a neurotically originated migraine pain. Consider them in the turn. The pain of an hysteric in extremis is worth considering only if there is no extra-mental cause of this seeming reality. More precisely, we postulate the existence of a truly hysterical situation in which no extra-mental cause exists for what seems to the sufferer to be a pain. Then is not this seeming, since it is of the essence of the hysterical attack, in all probability a merely hysterical seeming? And does not that put the reality of the pain in doubt? Thus, Sartre somewhere describes an hysterical patient, rolling on the floor ‘in agony’ – who has no pain! The very extremity of the case attests to the extremity of the mental disintegration of the subject. In a word, if a pain is truly hysterical, that pain is unreal. After all, such ‘pains’ defy the ministrations of the most powerful analgesics, yet yield to sudden slaps and shocks! Is this not a weighty reason for supposing them unreal, to be no more than the internal object of a theatrical yet desperate experience? When one’s mental state is as disturbed as it is in situations of this kind, Cartesian authority goes by the board. We find this state of affairs also in dreams, where once again we are not in full possession of ourselves. Are we to say that those who dream of blue skies or pains actually have blue visual sensations and pains? But they may be both blind and physically incapable of either sensation. Common to the dreamer and the hysteric in extremis is a situation in which one’s lack of full self-possession is manifest in illusory experiences of a sensory object in which the physical causes of such sensations are inoperative. The problem really turns upon the correct characterisation of phenomenona like neurotic migraine. Now it is a truism that many psychosomatic disorders utilise physical mechanisms, and we know that some migraines are caused by cerebral vascular events. What is of interest in

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the neurotic sub-variety is, that the pain is real and its immediate origin physical even though those physical sources can be traced back ultimately to mental agencies. Then what we are invited to accept by those who reject (β) (above), is that a situation exists in which a seeming pain which originates wholly from the deranged mind is nonetheless real. We are to suppose that mental derangement might give rise to an intense pain (say) in the shin, a pain that is as real as the agonies of men on the rack, which is totally unresponsive to all and any analgesics! Can one seriously entertain this supposition? I do not think so. (3) In short, it is not really possible to believe in the existence of pains that refuse of necessity to yield before any chemical that fails to affect pain otherwise than through affecting the mental state of the sufferer. In other words, all bodily sensations necessarily have immediate physical non-mental origins. But since all actions necessarily have immediate mental origins, the class of all sensations and the class of all actions must necessarily be mutually exclusive. That is, necessarily no sensations are actions. Necessarily, all sensations have the will-value: inactive. Here we have an a priori limit upon the will’s extension. 4. a un iversal limit upon the extension of t he will (a) The generic determination of will-value (1) I shall now generalise the latter conclusion that necessarily no sensation is a willing. First, I note that some events are active. Examples are: walking, listening, trying to remember. And that they are active is something that is conceptually evident, for it is overtly attested in their name or type. It is a necessary property of these events, at least under these descriptions, that they have the will-value they have. Thus, it may take much psychological investigation to discover that, in witnessing certain scissors-like motions in the legs of some being, we are witnessing an example of walking; but once that empirical discovery has been made, nothing more needs to be known if we are to know whether or not we have been witnessing an activity. Necessarily, all walkings are active. This holds irrespective of whether the walker be awake, asleep, unconscious, madman, baby, animal, god, computer, or even statue. And some psychological events are active. Examples are: listening, trying to remember, thinking. Equally, some psychological events are inactive. For example: noticing, coming to know, being in pain, being in a rage. And here

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likewise their non-active status is a generic trait, conclusively attested in their names or descriptions. Thus, necessarily all examples of noticing a light are not the doing of a deed, and quite irrespective of whether the noticing is itself willed. Whatever the origin of our rages, however voluntaristic some of them may seem, the rages themselves are not actions. (2) Because these necessities are generic, no event falling under one such active heading, say the heading ‘listening’, can simultaneously qualify for the epithet ‘inactive’, and no event falling under an inactive heading, say the heading ‘hearing’, can simultaneously qualify for the epithet ‘active’. Therefore the classes of hearings and actions have no logical product. To suppose that there just might conceivably be an example of hearing that is active, say when we listen with actively focussed attention, is to confuse the bearer of one will-value with that of another. Necessarily, if x is a hearing x is inactive – and that is that. We have here a second example of an a priori limit upon the will’s extension. In such a way the concept of will-value can assist us in the conceptual analysis of psychological types. Thus, the phenomena in the mind divide in two according to their will-value, and this is a matter of real moment: it attests to the fact that the will-value of mental events is a necessary consequence of their type: it is, so to speak, a species characteristic. Indeed, I believe it to be an essential characteristic, for I believe mental events fall essentially under their least ambitious type-heading. It is true that some phenomena can crop up willed on some occasions, and unwilled on other occasions, and perhaps mental imagery is such a phenomenon. But what we do not encounter in the mind are psychological event-types which are such that some instances are actions and some are not. The phenomenon of imagery constitutes no exception to this hard-and-fast rule. The rule in question corresponds to a major divide running down through the phenomena in the mind, comparable in significance to the great divide that marks off those phenomena that can owe their existence to the faculty of reason (beliefs, desires, intentions, actions, etc.) from those that cannot (dreams, emotions, sense-impressions, etc.). Having taken note of the above, I must append an interesting rider. Now willing is an unusual kind of mental kind. And it has an unusual property in common with another unusual mental kind, viz. with direct-object imagining. Thus, there is no such thing as just imagining an object. Direct-object imagining invariably utilises a mediator mental phenomenon which connects the phenomenon of imagining with some object. For example, the imagining might be a quasi-seeing of some physical object or a quasi-hearing of

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some sound. Then somewhat analogously trying invariably is an attempt to realise a mental phenomenon of some kind, for there is no such thing as just trying: it is trying to hear, or understand, or remember, and suchlike. This is a significant similarity between these two psychological kinds. Meanwhile I note in passing that trying and direct-object imagining part company on one important count: both direct-object and propositional imagining are doomed never to instantiate their prototype mental phenomenal kind (e.g. see/know), whereas by contrast trying is capable of success. A summary account of the mental classificatory situation is as follows. In the first place the phenomena in the mind are capable of being classified via their will-values: they are either willings, or they are non-willings. But in the second place, from what we have just seen this cannot be a classification into two broad mental kinds in the way we might classify mental phenomena into (say) emotions and knowings and perceivings (etc.). Like direct-object imaginings it is a ‘meta-structuring’, a classification of a wholly different order. (3) In the foregoing discussion I take myself to have uncovered a rule of the form: necessarily, no events of psychological kind x are actions (where ‘x’ can take numerous values, ranging over ‘notice’, ‘remember’, ‘intend’, and other mental types). Then amongst these types it is pertinent to the discussion which now follows to take note of the fact that no continuous phenomenon of believing, and no event of coming to believe, are in any possible world actions. These are both examples of the type of logical limitation upon the will that I have so far unearthed. Nevertheless, such a rule is not what I shall now be looking for, however significant in its own right. What I shall now be seeking is an event of a kind k such that the following is true: necessarily, no events of kind k are willed. In short, I will be looking for an event kind k, such that no events of kind k can in any world relate to the will as do arm risings to basic arm raisings. It is a logical limit upon willed producings that I shall be seeking. A logical limit on the objects of the will. 5. the unwill abilit y of belief (a) A statement of the claim Two mental phenomena appear prima facie to be logically unwillable. They are, desire and belief. One thing of note about these phenomena, as about action itself, is their intimate bond with reason. I believe this to be the source of the above ‘intuition’: it suggests that the will cannot determine

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phenomena of such a kind, being causally ‘stymied’ by objectivities. Thus, there are five phenomena that can be either rational or irrational or mad, viz. belief, desire, intention, trying, and action – and that exhausts the field. As a result it seems natural to suppose that neither belief, nor desires other than those simple insensitive-to-reason body-based urges like hunger or thirst, could ever immediately be willed. This important entirely controversial claim is obscured by the equally important and altogether uncontroversial truth that, whether immediately willed or merely instrumentally manipulated, one’s desires and beliefs in general escape the light-fingered control of their owner. For even if some beliefs owe their existence to the inclinations, those inclinations mostly engender beliefs without the active co-operation of their owner. And even if some beliefs are actively manipulated into place by their owner, this is for the most part a drawn-out, subterranean, self-deceptive business. There is something absurd in the suggestion that one might openly and avowedly at a certain instant install some belief in one’s mind. Now many discussions concerning belief and will have made this absurdity their target, and doubtless were right in their criticisms. Meanwhile certain other discussions, without adequately drawing the requisite distinctions, have equally correctly taken as their target a claim of the kind already rejected by me, viz. that either believing or coming-to-believe could itself ever be an action. However, the question I am asking is, not whether belief can at will be light-fingeredly installed within the mind, nor whether believing or coming-to-believe can be a willing. My question is different. It is the question: can there be an act that is the bringing about of belief in the way there is an act that is the immediate bringing about of arm rise? As there is an act which falls non-instrumentally under ‘the bringing about of arm rise’, can there be an act which falls non-instrumentally under ‘the bringing about of belief’? A doubly absurd suggestion, one naturally suspects, in that the existence of such an act would seem to entail the existence of the capacity voluntarily at a certain instant light-fingeredly to install a certain belief in one’s mind. But why light-fingeredly? Why not ponderously and tediously eked out? Why not, indeed! But why not light-fingeredly? For could any such act be essentially ponderous? If such an act can exist, it must be intelligible to speak of the existence of such a supple sub-variety. (b) The necessary irrationality of any supposed willed belief (1) I will begin by supposing that there might exist an act of immediately willing belief. I shall call it ‘b-believing’, and make the natural and indeed necessary assumption that it was caused by an act-desire. Then what I want

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now to discover is, what is the relation between the willed (b-believed) belief and the act-desire which caused the act of b-believing? We have seen that it is a necessary truth that no belief can be an act. Then I suggest that this ensures that b-believing and the willed belief cannot share the same immediate cause. If an act-desire to b-believe a belief is to achieve its act-goal then it must cause that belief – and believing is non-active. Therefore if such an act did occur, something must have interposed causally between the act-desire and the belief. That something would have to be an act-mechanism. Now that alone seems to imply that the belief must have a non-rational cause. For how could a mechanism be a causally interlocking sequence of rational causes? An act-mechanism must be akin to a perceptual-mechanism in being a sequence of items that under standard conditions regularly cause one another. It must be a form of natural equipment which one may utilise in ignorance both of its existence and its structure. But if a rational belief has rational causes, those causes ought in general to be accessible to their owner. It follows that any immediately willed belief must be irrational. And this conclusion follows anyhow from the fact that a contemporaneous desire caused the belief, for that permits us to reject the subject’s proffered rationalisations, to judge them not the real reasons for his belief, and to conclude that nothing that was his reason caused the belief. In short, b-believed beliefs must necessarily be irrational. Now one might perhaps suppose that, even though b-believed beliefs cannot but be irrational, acts of b-believing might manage somehow to be rational. But how could the state of mind of a b-believer ever be rational? For the very moment such a being acts, irrationality inheres! And how then could the act be rational? This would be a man who, in the name of reason, takes a leap into the dark of unreason! It seems that, on the score of rationality, a kind of antinomy lurks within such an action. It would have to give expression to forces of reason that necessarily it negates as it gives such expression! (2) In sum, if b-believing were possible, an irrational belief would have to be actively and instantaneously installed in a mind by the use of an act-mechanism. Is such a state of affairs intelligible? Well, it is important that we recognise that there is nothing the least untoward about some of the features of this situation. The most sublime paragons of intelligence and rationality, being human, cannot fail to be encumbered by a multitude of irrational beliefs. Such avowedly irrational pressures as advertising, charm, the irrational force of irrational and nonrational desires, cannot but make some headway in any mind. Indeed, it is normal, healthy one might say, that some desires should cause some beliefs.

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Then such beliefs are held for no reason. Being irrational, their causes are causally efficacious without having need to appeal to that in us which is capable of understanding an evidential or justificatory relation. That is, to our reason. They are non-rational causes. In fact, many of our irrational beliefs do not even pretend to be there as a result of reason: they insolently take up residence in the mind off their own bat; as if to say: ‘Take us or leave us for what we are.’ People rarely bother to rationalise the almost universal delusion that they are more intelligent than they are. Or better looking! After all, why do people ‘wear the right face’ when they study themselves in a mirror? These manoeuvres in front of the mirror, albeit carried out under the cover of a thin mental smoke screen, seem to me to be a particularly blatant instance of the active manipulation of an irrational belief here and now into the mind. And in the literal face of counter-evidence! For the most part, people calmly accept this irrational belief without even bothering to rationalise it. In short, irrational beliefs abound, held for no reason, installed without even a fac¸ade of pseudo-reasons. What is more, as we have just noted, unquestionably there exist acts, indeed there exist intentional acts, that are the bringing about of one’s believing certain propositions. Such phenomena are everywhere about us. Thus, a fanatically religious person gets himself to accept a dogma that initially he doubts by a variety of active devices; a woman ‘makes mouths in a glass’1 and perpetuates a prejudiced opinion in herself concerning the quality of her looks; and so on. To sum up: there exists such a thing as an act that falls intentionally under the description ‘the bringing about in oneself of belief —’, albeit in the instrumental use of the expression, where the very method of installation is such as to guarantee the irrationality of the belief and where the methods are light-fingered and instantaneously effective. This takes us some of the way towards the act of b-believing. But, as we shall see, it cannot take us all the way. (c) Three difficulties confronting b-believing Three main difficulties stand in the way of our accepting the possibility of the immediate non-instrumental act, b-believing: (α) its ultimately self-defeating character, (β) its necessarily discontinuous character, (γ ) its unnaturalness. I shall consider these in turn. (α) The state of affairs sketched above in (b), in which we actively and instantaneously manipulate an irrational belief into ourselves, is not all that remote from the specifications laid down for b-believing. Nevertheless, in all 1

‘For there never yet was fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.’ King Lear, Act iii, Scene ii.

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these cases we notice a certain strain, the strain that inevitably accompanies the mentally schismatic, wherein the right hand knows not what the left is doing. And it seems to me that this strain cannot but reach breaking point in the putative overt self-conscious instances of b-believing. I make such a claim because an overt self-conscious b-believer openly performs a deed that negates the very foundations of the phenomenon of belief in a self-conscious consciousness. Thus, belief that occurs in a selfconscious consciousness self-consciously aims at the true – unlike belief in dumb animals (which does not occur under the aspect of truth). Selfconscious belief that p, is the belief that p is true, which is the belief that the world is such that p is true. Then a self-conscious b-believer ought to be able to make such alarming utterances as: ‘This belief that p, this belief that the world is such that the claim p is true, is purely and simply engendered by a desire that is wholly insensitive to such concerns.’ Conceivably, he might even say: ‘My b-believed belief that it is raining is one that I hold irrespective of the state of the weather’! Now the very mad come near to this – though it is far from certain that all of the seeming beliefs of the very mad are to rate as genuine beliefs, bearing in mind that these seeming beliefs are installed in the mind like invading possessive demons without the free assent of the subject. After all, a madman might say: ‘I think the sun is shining even though there is no sun’ – whereupon we will hardly know whether he affirms a belief about an existent or inexistent sun, and so scarcely know what or whether he believes! As it seems to me, these wild utterances are poised on the verge of unintelligibility, and may have already crossed the divide. It is, I should imagine, a mere matter of degree, and I would have thought that, with an increasingly naked affirmation of the negation of the foundations of belief, such claims cannot but self-defeatingly bring about their own negation. They practise a sort of suicide in public: fading before our very eyes. Thus, I think that the instantaneous and pellucidly self-conscious active manipulation of belief into the mind cannot be a reality, even though I think we should recognise that, with an increasing strain on intelligibility, people might come surprisingly close to this asymptotic limit. Then before I move on to considering the second difficulty (β), let me here quickly summarise what has so far emerged, in order to put difficulty (α) in perspective. (i) Necessarily, believings are not willings. (ii) Nevertheless, beliefs can owe their existence to desire. (iii) Moreover, people sometimes actively manipulate these beliefs into their own minds. (iv) Such acts are instrumental in type. (v) Sometimes instantaneous. (vi) And intentional (because purposive). (vii) They are necessarily self-deceptive acts. (viii) And necessarily

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irrational. Accordingly, it follows from the above that if the b-believing act is to be a reality, it will have to be a non-instrumental act that necessarily is irrational and practised self-deceptively. (β) This looks like an implausible option. And there is a second rather complex difficulty facing any putative b-believing, which I now spell out. Thus, while belief is a continuous state, it is not a processive continuant (just as the continuity of time or of some object’s shape is not, whereas that of a whistle or skid is, a processive continuant). After all, in principle belief could continue in a condition of refrigeration in which all mental processes had ceased. Now any act that is a bringing about of something must be an act of bringing about either a processive continuant (say, an act of bending something) or a discontinuous event (say, the act of snapping that thing). Then since believing is a non-processive continuant, b-believing would have to be an act of bringing about a momentary discontinuous event, viz. the onset of belief. Then it seems to me that such an act could occur only if it is the completion of some activity: that is, of some belief analogue of the activity of bending. But which activity? I know of none such. And if this difficulty is simply shrugged off, it would still follow that any putative b-believing act would have to take the form of a distinct momentary act of bringing about a simultaneous and momentary event of belief-onset. Thus, it would have to be an act that is not an activity: an active event that is not constituted out of an activity process! Are such phenomena possible? Do we know of any acts that are not realised through the on-going of an activity? Do we know of any autonomous momentary and individual acts whose interior is not an activity? I cannot believe in these entities, nor a fortiori in a b-believing matching these specifications. This momentary non-processive act of b-believing seems to be in serious difficulties. (γ ) Here is a final, third, difficulty facing any putative concept of bbelieving. B-believing, in falling non-instrumentally under ‘b-believing’, must be one of a limited menagerie of mental acts. That is, it must be a bedrock sui generis type of mental act in the sense in which attending or ratiocinating or trying-to-remember are all of them types of mental act. And there are very few of these. For in the sense of ‘mental-act type’ here being employed, those mental-act headings that are necessarily instrumental, such as ‘arousing desire’, do not rate as mental-act types. Thus, if I arouse desire for a meal by the instrumental means of sustaining an image of a meal, this activity will rate as an instance of the mental type imagining, and not as an instance of some supposed mental type – arousing of desire. For to repeat: while there is a limitless number of instrumental

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mental-act headings, there is an extreme shortage of mental-act headings that can be used non-instrumentally. Then in fact no such act-type as bbelieving actually exists. And since Nature seems to have all the originals, one might on these grounds alone view the idea of b-believing with scepticism. In the mind, Nature has the disconcerting habit of matching the factual and the a priori. The sheer absence of a kind is of some philosophical moment. (d) Denouement (1) Thus, while the unself-conscious, intentional, and instrumental act of belief installation is a reality, b-believing has to meet additional much more stringent requirements. It must be an act which is not an activity: a momentary, non-processive, non-instrumental, necessarily unself-conscious, necessarily self-deceptive and irrational act, consisting in the immediate and mechanistically effected installation of the onset of a necessarily irrational belief. Further, it must be a novel act-type or natural essence. And finally, this instance of a novel act-type can never come to full self-consciousness under the heading under which it falls intentionally. Now this imposes a series of strains well in excess of those faced by the merely instrumental self-deceptive act. And at this point, I collapse! I will now freely admit that I am incapable of delivering an absolutely decisive coup de grˆace, either to avowedly selfconscious light-fingered instrumental belief-installing acts, or to b-believing itself (great as its sins may appear!). Accordingly, I shall close this discussion of the willing of belief with the following summary judgement of the position I have reached on this matter. (2) Believing is in itself essentially inactive. Nonetheless, our desires cause some of our beliefs, as do some of our intentions. Thus, there exist acts which fall under the instrumental description ‘the installing of belief in the mind’, and in this sense belief can sometimes owe its existence to the will. Yet if we make these acts increasingly self-conscious and instantaneous, intelligibility is pushed to the limit. Then since these offending elements would have to be present in any self-conscious instance of a ‘willing of belief ’ that putatively is modelled upon the strong and non-instrumental paradigm, the willing of arm rise in arm raising – which is to say in an act of ‘b-believing’ – that act must be all but necessarily incapable of appearing in full self-consciousness under its own name. And it must be an act that is not an activity, and a novel or ‘original’ mental act-type or essence; etc.

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So much for its failings. Personally, I think they are enough to see bbelieving over the brink. Therefore I believe first of all that necessarily believings are not actions, and secondly that necessarily there is no act that is the immediate bringing about of belief, where the necessity has in each case the strength of the entailment bond. We seem to have here a phenomenon that logically falls outside the domain of willable phenomena. Nevertheless, a slight and residual uncertainty remains. 6 . the unwill abilit y of willing (a) That is, the necessary non-existence of acts that non-instrumentally are the bringing about of one’s own acts (1) I shall now instance a psychological phenomenon which is such that, without any doubt and with the strength of the entailment bond, it could not be willed. That event is none other than the event of willing. But at this statement the reader may understandably grow restive, protesting that while it was with some difficulty that he tolerated my repeated use of the word ‘will’, I have at this point gone too far. He refuses to allow me the word! For the very paradoxicality of my claim is, he may protest, nothing more than a direct consequence of my leaning too heavily on an inadequately explained term. And even if the paradoxical thesis should somehow turn out to be true, there can be little doubt that it would be a trivial circularity, a mere play on a word. I hope to show that both criticisms are misguided, and would like in passing to explain my predilection for the word ‘will’. First, I use the word because I believe in the reality of – the will!: a sui generis psychological phenomenal something whose existence philosophers have in recent years tended to deny. Second, I am wedded to the word ‘will’ on account of its philosophical suggestiveness and fertility. Continually to use this word is, so to say, continually to tease a radical version of volitionism out into the light of day. Since something in us cannot but subscribe to that theory – as something in us cannot but subscribe to the Cartesian account of the mind–body relation – such a procedure ought to be salutary. In short, ‘shady’ as it may seem, in employing this word I am engaging in what may be described as philosophical tactics! Yet having said that, I will take this opportunity of reminding the reader of the particular usage that I endorsed in the glossary at the beginning of this work, and elaborate on it a little. To say of an act  that it is a willing is to say of it that it is an act that is the willing of some φ, while to say of an act that it is the willing of some

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φ is to say that it is the act of immediately bringing about φ. All therefore turns on the sense of ‘. . . is the act of immediately bringing about φ’. How to explain it? Well, let us suppose that a basic act  occurs, and that  is an act of φ-making, where φ is the limb movement that the generating act-desire was directed towards producing – say, the event of arm rise. Then in the usage that I have stipulatively, but as it seems to me entirely naturally adopted, φ is willed and  is a willing of φ, and  is the act of bringing about φ. But if an instrumental act  occurs, so that it has occurred only because some act  has caused the event φ  that is logically necessitated for a  act to occur, and irrespective of whether  was intentional under ‘ ’, then φ  is not willed and a fortiori  is not a willing of φ  . Thus, if a man starts a car by pressing a button, then the event of the car’s starting, φ  , is not willed, and the act of car starting,  , is not a willing of φ  . Now since the latter instrumental act may well be identical with the basic act of moving a limb, it follows that I must believe that, while an act  is not a willing of φ  , it may be that it is identical with a willing of some φ or other. But this is a separate issue. The rationale behind this usage is as follows. I believe in the existence of the contentious psychological phenomenon, the will. And I recognise that the will is an object-taking phenomenon. And I note further that, being directed, physical willing reaches out into physical nature, selecting as it were miraculously but in any case in some sense immediately, a very first target point and a very first target phenomenon at that point. Then that first target phenomenon – which must under some description find representation in the generating act-desire, as it does (say) in ‘The desire to do with the fingers of my left hand whatever it is I do to get the required vibrato out of this violin’ – is in my stipulative use ‘willed’. And its effects are not ‘willed’. Accordingly, when I say of some phenomenon φ that it is willed, I imply that there occurs an act of φ-making which does not fall under ‘’ or ‘φ-making’ in either the instrumental or the constitutive mode, and that gives expression to a desire to do a φ-making act. It follows that arm rise is willed in common or garden acts of raising an arm; that the functioning of most of our internal organs and musculature is not willed; and neither is an event of a car’s starting that results from a willed arm movement. I believe that this usage does justice to the causal peculiarities of action. (2) Then the present suggestion is, that while arm rise can be willed, the event that is the willing of arm rise cannot be willed. That is, I claim that there is no act that is the willing of an act that is the willing of arm rise.

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Yet is it not certain that we actively contrive to engineer some of our own active behaviour? It is, indeed. There are acts that are the bringing about of one’s own acts. Thus, there exists an act of the following type: the bringing about of one’s moving one’s arm. For example, one might set the alarm in order to bring about a (more or less automatic and unthinking) reaching act on the morrow. Clearly this is not a situation in which we will our own willing. For we are concerned here with nothing more than a special subclass of instrumental acts: namely, the sub-class in which the manipulated effect is active and the manipulated object is oneself. In short, while it is a willing producing of a willing, it is not a willing of a willing. For my claim is not that a certain act-type cannot exist. It is rather that a certain act-type is necessarily instrumental. While some arm raisings are instrumental and some are not, all tree choppings and all bringings about of arm raising are of necessity instrumental. Then to repeat the claim of this present section 6. Necessarily, there is no act that is the immediate bringing about of an act: that is, no act falls non-instrumentally and non-constitutively under ‘the bringing about of an act’. For example, there can be no act that is the immediate bringing about of the event that is the basic act of bringing about arm rise. But it is time to try and prove this. (b) The mechanism of any putative willing of an act must encompass that of the willing of the act I will now meet this problem head on. I shall assume that willings can be willed, and see what follows. Thus, I shall suppose that there exists such an act as a willing of a willing, and I shall call it ‘θ ’. That is, I am assuming that there exists an act θ that is the immediate bringing about of an act  that is the bringing about of a certain event, φ. Now when an act of (say) arm raising occurs, brain events activate a motor mechanism which involves the temporally and causally ordered sequence of events whose last member is arm rise. Accordingly, I shall suppose that for this contentious act θ to occur, a sequence S1 of causally related events leading up to  must occur, and I must suppose that for  likewise some sequence S2 is required. Then since the temporally and causally ordered sequence S2 is ushered into being by the temporally and causally ordered sequence S1, the first event of S2 must be ushered into being by the last event of S1. It follows that if there is an act θ that is the immediate bringing about of , there must exist a temporally and causally ordered sequence S3 which splices S2 onto S1. That is, if θ is a reality, an

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enlarged mechanism S1 + S2, encompassing the mechanism S2 of , must also be a reality. Now this entire sequence must be a mechanism of φ-making. Thus, all of its parts are mechanistically linked; it terminates in what is the terminus of the act ; its first member is mind- and intention-sensitive; its last member is φ. But ex hypothesi so also is S2 a mechanism of φ-making. In short, when the supposed ‘willing of willing’ (θ) occurs, two acts of φ-making must occur, one being the making-occur of the other! But now we must ask the question: on what grounds do we separate out from the ‘large’ act of φ-making (θ) a ‘small’ act of φ-making ()? One thing seems clear: that the grounds cannot consist in the presence or absence of suitable psychological act-causal factors. To see this, and in general to understand better what is at issue, I shall consider an actual putative θ-act situation. For if there exist acts that are the bringing about of acts, the following seems about as likely a candidate for that title as we shall find. (c) A putative example of willing willing I stand at the top of the palace steps, palpitating with anxiety, because at that very moment I harbour within my unquiet breast the intention of shooting the portly smiling ambassadorial figure who is by now but a few yards off and gliding inexorably my way. The immediate practical problem is: to shoot this monster. But meanwhile, thanks to my gathering anxiety another practical problem looms up pari passu with the looming figure of the ambassador, viz. to get myself to shoot him! Then the theory that there are θ-acts amounts to the following claim. Putting firmly to one side the irrelevant possibility of the self-inflicted use of possibly successful goads – such as evoking the mental image of the most heinous of his countless heinous deeds and thereby precipitating a violent attack on his person (which is merely instrumental in type), the θ-theorist must maintain that these practical problems are yet two. That is: I must do the act; but by making myself do it. I, on the other hand, believe that, once the employment of instrumental means is decisively deleted from the picture, the only remaining practical problem is: to do it! So that once instrumentality is removed as a possibility, and I am yet concerned to get myself to do it, getting myself to do it and doing it then telescope into doing it. To be sure, where doing is beset by an overwhelming burden of anxiety, doing can be difficult. Why should we suppose that doing cannot be difficult? Is it because the willing subject is thought of as ‘a motor which has no inertia in itself to

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overcome’?2 But we are all of us familiar with the phenomenon of ‘nerving oneself ’ to act, which unquestionably is a case in which doing is difficult. Then it is clear that ‘nerving oneself ’ to act, when understood noninstrumentally, is acting – in the face of anxiety. It is part of the human condition that we must struggle with the entirely intangible and invisible foe, anxiety. Anxiety does not block the path to action like a boulder in the way, but more in the manner of illness which saps our very centre,3 or cuts the ground beneath our feet. Thus, in the final analysis, there is nothing one can do with anxiety but freeze up in its grip or act in its despite. Acting in its despite is the overcoming of anxiety. As Kafka remarked: ‘You are the problem. No scholar to be found far and wide.’4 Therefore getting oneself to shoot this monstrous ambassadorial figure is, if understood noninstrumentally, ‘nerving oneself to shoot’, which telescopes into – mere shooting – in despite of anxiety. It follows that ‘getting oneself to act’, is, here, a re-description of the act of shooting, made possible by the presence of the anxiety one non-technically or non-instrumentally overcomes in acting. The act of shooting is the non-instrumentally effected act of getting oneself to shoot, and falls under the two descriptions ‘shooting’ and ‘getting oneself to shoot’: the first description, while equally inessentialist, being prior to the second. Therefore ‘getting oneself to shoot’, when employed non-instrumentally, cannot be a description of an event that takes an act-event as its object. This act-event of ‘getting oneself to shoot’ is in no sense directed to any act, let alone at itself. To repeat: it is nothing but acting – in despite of anxiety. (d) Finalising the argument So, at any rate, I believe, but I must still clinch the point. We are asked by the θ-theorist to suppose that there is a θ -act, that is the getting of myself to shoot, that is non-identical with that act of shooting. In short, we are asked to believe that the practical problems are two. Then since the act of getting myself to shoot must itself be a shooting, seeing that it involves a mechanistically effected sequence leading to trigger pulling, I shall have to perform two non-identical acts of shooting this august personage! Then to repeat the earlier question: on what grounds do we separate out the 2 3

4

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953, §618. ‘Disease . . . no one who is not ill can have any idea of it. They think it something that can be striven against, something outside oneself. They are wrong: disease becomes one’s very self.’ Andr´e Malraux, The Conquerors, translated by Winifred Stephens Whale, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, 119. ‘Reflections on sin’, in The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces, London: Martin Secker, 1933.

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-act of shooting, which is supposedly generated in the course of the θact? I suggested it could not be because of the presence or absence of any suitable psychological act-causal factors. Call θ-shooting ‘shooting1 ’, and -shooting ‘shooting2 ’. Question: why engage in shooting2 ? Answer: to rid the world of a monster. Question: why engage in shooting1 ? Answer: not in order to remove a monster; but because I thought my nerve was failing and I wanted  to occur. Now what sense of ‘shoot’ is being invoked here? What kind of shooting can it be? – An act that is the making happen of finger movement, that is performed for a different reason altogether from that which brings into being an all but simultaneous shooting, which likewise is the making happen of the identical finger movement? I know of no such ‘shooting’. The whole thing is, surely, in John Wisdom’s eloquent phrase, a piece of ‘metaphysical double vision’. So the example falls to the ground. And with it goes any real possibility of such a meta-act. 7. the unwill abilit y of striving One other phenomenon exists that cannot conceivably be willed. Namely, the phenomenon of striving or trying to do an act. In other words, the sheer movement of the will itself! Now my usage of ‘will’ is such that φ is willable iff there might exist an act of φ-making that is the expression of the desire to perform such an act and that falls non-instrumentally and non-constitutively under ‘φmaking’: the basic act of φ-making being taken as a paradigmatic example of such a willing of φ. Then just as such a φ is willable only if there exists a suitable mechanistic link between desiring or intending to will φ and φ itself, so it must be with the event of trying. Trying can be willable only if there exists a suitable mechanistic link between desiring or intending to will trying and trying itself. But such an idea involves one in serious difficulties. For a problem arises when we come to consider the origins of the two supposed events, trying and willing-trying. Thus, the putative willing of trying must, being of the type of willing, give expression to some urge, impulse, or desire, call it D1. Meanwhile, the object-event which is a trying must, being of the type of trying, also give expression to some urge or impulse that is distinct, call it D2. And since strivings are immediately caused by desires it is clear that D1 must cause D2, a causation that must in turn be causally mediated by the supposed mechanism of try-making. Then the difficulty is this. What is supposed to be the relation between the desire D2 and the act-mechanism that, in linking D1 and trying, supposedly manages to make this phenomenon of trying an event that

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has been willed? In particular, does desire D2 fall within or without that mechanism? Diagrammatically, is it like: D1 (to will-try-Φ)

SUPPOSED ACT MECHANISM (for willing-of-try-Φ)

D2 (to try-Φ)

TRY-Φ ?

Fig. 1

Or is it like: D1

SUPPOSED Φ D2 ACT MECHANISM

TRY-Φ ?

Fig. 2

If we suppose the situation to be as in the first diagram, then the immediate causal progenitors of the trying event actually fall without the mechanism. But in that case one can merely perform an active something or other that is such as to bring about a separate urge and separate striving effect. In short, this putative willing of trying is in fact nothing but an instrumental act of bringing about one’s own there and then striving. That is, it is not a willing of trying. If we suppose the situation to be as in the second diagram, then desire D2 actually falls within the mechanism. But that is impossible. How could a desire event be an element in an act-mechanism? So how could desire be part of the putative act-mechanism whereby this trying manages to fall under the description ‘successfully willed object of a willing event’? I conclude: logically necessarily, no trying or striving is ever immediately or non-instrumentally willingly produced. Necessarily, each movement of the will is a fresh and completely novel movement of the will. Thus, strivings join believings and willings as members of the class of phenomena that logically necessarily are never immediate objects for the will. It seems clear that, within the very confines of the human animal, there exist phenomena that in this sense have a wall of logical strength to shield them from the impact of the will. In this fundamental sense the power of the will is blunted and of necessity finite.

chapter 2

Is the body the final boundary of the will?

We have just seen that there are logical limits to the power of the will. And this is something which ought not surprise us, seeing that those limits have been discerned within that very special sector of the world, the mind. Then there is a tendency to express what we have just discovered in the following way. We have been brought to see that the will cannot be exercised indiscriminately, but only on certain things – rather as the antennae of an animal might be able to engage with surfaces of only a particular texture, and reject and recoil from others. We must be thinking of the will as some kind of force that reaches out and activates certain classes of entities. Not all, apparently! Then what are some of the things it cannot operate on? We have seen that the phenomenon of belief is one of these; and, reflexively, so is the will itself. On the other hand, we know that the will is capable of activating some of our limbs; and these are extra-mental entities. Then are there extra-mental entities which defy the power of the will? What about common-or-garden material objects? Indeed, what about the entire sector of the world that lies beyond the subject’s body? Is the body the final boundary of the will? 1. metaphysics Before I consider this question, I must first explain my use of the word ‘metaphysical’ here in Part I. During this section of the work I shall be making considerable use of this term, for the reason that the above question of limits has characteristics and evokes claims which would once have been described by some philosophers as metaphysical in type. However, in so doing I realise that I am putting the word ‘metaphysical’ to a special use, one which is to be found in the writings of Wittgenstein and elsewhere. It is a pejorative sense, but it is highly pertinent to the central question of Part I, viz. is the body the final boundary of the will? The sense in question is as follows. As I use the word ‘metaphysical’ in Part I, I take this property to 74

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be equivalent to (i) being philosophical in type, (ii) false, (iii) involving the application of a priori reason to questions which cannot be settled through such means, and (iv) tending to confuse the philosophical with the very general physical. (‘Super Science’ as John Wisdom put it.) Although I do not doubt that there are genuine inquiries that fall under the traditional term ‘metaphysical’, because I am here in Part I concerned with claims which occur at the behest of false metaphysics of the pejorative kind, this pejorative (‘Bad Metaphysics’) sense is the sense employed in the remainder of Part I. To repeat: when in the course of chapters 2 to 4 I employ the term ‘metaphysical’, I mean the property of being philosophical, false, involving inappropriate application of a priori methods, generally with pretensions to Super Science. Elsewhere I use ‘metaphysical’ in the received way: namely, pertaining to inquiry into the ultimate nature of things. One point of significance, which helps to explain the pejorativeness of this special sense of ‘metaphysical’. Over a vast extended period in the remote past mankind devised certain fundamental linguistic usages which designate the ultimate realities of human existence. These realities form the subject-matter of philosophy: space, time, self, consciousness, thought, action, etc. Now those usages, which must be common to all properly developed languages, came into existence pari passu with and internal to the development of self-consciousness: the acquisition of these concepts, and the mutation of mere consciousness to self-consciousness, were not distinct phenomena. It follows that the discovery of the fundamental realities of existence cannot have been exercises of an already developed rationality. Nonetheless certain natural facts must have guided mankind in the formation of those usages, and so too in man’s awareness of the reality of what they designate, and done so in a way which utilises a crystallising rationality. Now it is frequently but not always the case that pejorative metaphysics (‘Bad Metaphysics’) propounds claims which run counter to the fundamental usages of language: for example, the claim that we cannot know the future. Accordingly, such metaphysical assertions should be seen as substituting a priori philosophical reasoning in place of the considerations which semi-rationally guided early mankind in the formation of those usages and the accompanying awareness of the realities which the usages designated: here one is misguidedly looking within to the concepts in one’s mind rather than without to common usage and the original facts which led to those usages. Then the ‘badness’ of this variety of ‘Bad Metaphysics’ consists in thus turning away from the natural facts, and substituting in its place the a priori reasoning of metaphysics. It does not consist in the use of a priori reasoning, nor in the use of a priori reasoning of a philosophical variety: it

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consists in the sub-variety of the latter which turns to the a priori where it should instead be examining the facts of existence which helped shape the fundamental linguistic usages and beliefs of mankind. This is what one means by saying that it has pretensions to ‘Super Science’. 2 . metaphysical l imits (1) Let us recall the findings of chapter 1. We there encountered two distinct types of logical limit on the will: first, on the extension of the concept; second, on the objects of the phenomenon. That is, we encountered what might be called a constitutive logical limit on what can be a willing, together with a logical limit on what can be willed. Thus, saying that the constitutive limit debars pain or believing from the scope of the will, says no more than that it is a logical necessity that no instance of pain or of belief is identical with any act. And saying that the logical limit upon what can be willed debars arm raising or holding a belief from the scope of the will, is simply to say that it is a necessary truth that there is no act that is the making happen of arm raising or of believing in the immediate sense in which basic acts are the making happen of limb movements. It follows that some items, like the phenomenon of belief, fall in a double sense outside the scope of the will – which is what one might expect, when one recalls that our entire sense of reality is intimately bound up with the mode of determination of our beliefs. Thus, no believing is an act, and there is no act that is the immediate generating of belief. (Thankfully, one might say!) Pain, on the other hand, which is necessarily never an action, is, I think, only contingently never willed. (2) Now I am inclined to say that, side by side with these logical limits, something like an a priori limit stands in the way of extending the will beyond the body, a limit which is perhaps best characterised as a ‘metaphysical limit’. However, it will emerge that, strictly speaking, the limit in question is not really a limit upon active power. It is a limitation of a different kind, and it is rather to be drawn within the language. And perhaps only temporarily, as I shall now explain. Thus there can, I think, be little doubt that there exists an inclination to say: ‘We cannot will the movement of extra-bodily entities.’ And yet, as I shall later argue, we are here trying to say what cannot legitimately be said. And we are trying to say what cannot be said, not necessarily in that the sentence lacks sense, but in that we none of us know what is or whether it has a sense. For example, I believe we none of us really know what someone means who says: ‘But we know that certain mystics can exert their wills on material objects’, any more

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than we understand the dogmatic: ‘No, that is a priori impossible.’ I am therefore not inclined to say that ‘we cannot exert the will on extra-bodily entities’ is necessary: that is, to interpret it as a species of logical limit. Rather does it seem to me that, in precisely the sense Wittgenstein had in mind when he remarked that ‘the form of the philosophical question is “I’m in a muddle”’ (or words to that effect), these philosophical assertions are the externalisation of just such a ‘muddle’. Clearly this cannot be to say that philosophical considerations limit the possible objects of the will, since that would imply that it was false that we can will the movement of extra-bodily objects. Equally, it does not mean that there is scope for the will of a special philosophical kind, which would make it true that we can. On this issue of truth-values my opinion is, that we are not as yet in a position to hold an opinion, and to affirm that in saying ‘We can/cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects’, we inevitably misuse the language. And so there exists a rather strained sense in which the will is confined to the body, merely in that we cannot as yet say that we can will the movement of the extra-bodily. Then if it is true, as I shall argue, that such utterances as ‘We might be able to will extra-bodily phenomena’ are forced out of one under the pressure exerted upon the mind by a metaphysical theory of the will, it might be said that there exists a sort of philosophical barrier to the exertion of the will beyond the body. But of course this is a highly misleading characterisation; and, to repeat, comes down to no more than this: that in making these assertions we are engaging in a philosophically determined misuse of the language. While these utterances may or may not have a sense, we are at present unaware of any such sense. They are, as yet, the mere expression of an unresolved amalgam of philosophical insight and confusion. 3. natural kind s and the bodily will (a) Learning the use of natural-kind terms (1) The main cause of the above misuse of language lies in the fact that in physical action mind and body come closer together than in any other phenomenon. Physical action splays across both domains as nothing else does. And it does so in a way we do not properly understand. We are unclear concerning the precise nature of the relation between the bodily events which we will and the mental phenomena to which they owe their existence. In my opinion it is this unclarity which generates metaphysical claims concerning the scope of the will, for our ignorance of the deeper facts

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removes constraints which are operative elsewhere. Now the phenomenal subject-matter of the purely physical sciences is ‘natural kinds’ in a sense which has little application in the mind. Thus, gold has a real essence which scientists eventually uncovered, but nothing comparable is possible in the case of (say) belief or thought. And so the bodily events that we will fall under the heading ‘natural kind’, whereas the status of the bodily actions in which they are willed must surely in some way differ. What does this tell us concerning the use and misuse of the language of action? This question leads me to the ensuing inquiry. The purpose of the discussion which now follows is to delineate certain respects in which the familiar natural-kind concepts and the concept of physical action are like and unlike. These similarities and dissimilarities concern those factors which determine whether those concepts are correctly used or misused. My aim in inquiring into this question is that I believe it will help us understand how it comes about that we misuse the concept of the bodily will in attempting to lead it beyond the body. What I have to say turns largely upon the fact that the concept of physical action, even though it is significantly unlike such a familiar natural-kind concept as that of blood in being amenable to differential a priori logical analysis, yet resembles those familiar examples of natural kinds in so far as it stands in need of a posteriorigiven conditions of application. That is, depth physical investigation is required to finalise the extension of the concept. And it is the role played by this factor, and in particular by contextual considerations, which determines that the extra-bodily application of active concepts – at least as things stand – inevitably involves misuse of the concept. These latter considerations give the point of the discussion which now follows. It begins with a review of the familiar Kripke/Putnam account of natural-kind terms. (2) When an ‘average’ speaker learns the use of natural-kind terms like ‘gold’ or ‘water’, he does not acquire a concept which fixes the extension of the term in the simple way (say) learning the meaning of ‘chair’ or ‘cousin’ fix their extension. Rather, the extension of these natural-kind terms is fixed, not just by what concepts people have in their minds, but indexically and scientifically. What is of overriding importance is the beginning stage of the history of the term, the vital historical phase wherein term and designatum first came together – for it determines much that follows. Such natural-kind terms are generally launched into the language through our adopting a diagnostic and interpretative standpoint towards states of affairs that strike us as being of more than chance significance, and is in any case achieved through our picking out some general something under a definite description. In

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this way, and with a little luck, some something is successfully descried and designated. The original coiners of the term single it out, however vast their ignorance as to its real nature, through the use of ‘epistemological pointers’. Thereafter, if we continue to use the term, and especially if its instances continue unambiguously to appear in the environment, we and they and all others are committed by this vital initial baptismal phase in which the term and its (veiled) designatum were formally wedded in a drawn-out ceremony. And yet our ultimate commitment is not to the initial ‘markers’, which may in fact find themselves ‘eased out’ into a secondary role by later and better ‘markers’ or even criteria, but to the whatever something those initial ‘markers’ marked. If a particular word ‘x’ has a history – and words are not things of the moment, but enduring entities with the staying power of cities – in which ‘x’ retains its sense, then the initial baptismal phase was the phase of commitment to a determinate sense, to a determinate designatum. Once such a word is successfully launched into a language, it becomes an objective historic entity, sustained by the minds and deeds of its owners, but with all important determining roots in the past. (3) What is especially noteworthy about this account for our present purposes, are two features. First, that even though we must from the start assume an encompassing category, whether it be event or material stuff or disease or living object, if the original designatory definite description is not to be vacuous, we can nonetheless successfully designate in ignorance of the real nature of that designatum. Secondly, that this is generally achieved by the use of ‘epistemological pointers’: say, the sensory properties/causal properties/locale of origin/etc. in the case of a material substance. Then all one need do to grasp the sense of such a natural-kind term is successfully pick out the designatum, and this necessitates that we pick it out under such a definite description as suffices to make it true that one knows the category or very general type of the designated item, even though it is not obligatory that we are apprised of what the item is. Thus, ‘Lithium is a stuff used in laboratories’ would be adequate, whereas ‘Lithium is a sort of apparatus’ or ‘Lithium is something that is blue’ would in their different ways both be inadequate. Meanwhile if the term itself is to have a sense, there must at some time have been speakers who knew which item the term designated. In short, a particular kind needs to have been a real constituent of the world, a relation of designation needs to have been established between a word and that kind, and the word needs to have been somewhere at some time in some sort of currency in the hands of some people. It is upon this basic edifice that all later linguistic practices lean.

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What is it to misuse a natural-kind word? Suppose I come across a colourless liquid when I am walking on a pulsar in Nebula M31 and refer to it as ‘water’. Have I misused the term? I have, perhaps prematurely for some, shaken off certain ‘marker’ constraints, and they might regard this as the final arbiter of misuse. But in this they are certainly mistaken. For it may be that I am an inordinately intuitive water diviner, and have merely been rash enough to put my trust in my powers even on M31 pulsars! And rash or not, I may even be right, indeed I may even know! Can this utterance be at once the product of knowledge and a misuse? Surely not. Thus, it seems that at no point in the history of a term can disregard of the (contingent, historical, original) ‘epistemological pointers’ actually entail misuse: rather, it evidences it. Then what is it to misuse a word? We could say that to misuse a word is to use a word that is an element of a language with an agreed meaning, as that word endowed with that meaning, without meaning by it what it means. Agreement or not with fact is irrelevant. If I think ‘water’ denotes the stuff which makes one drunk, describe the stuff with which the scientists are lacing their drinks as ‘water’, and it proves in fact to be water, then I have misused the word, for I have latched onto a public term that stands for water and taken it to stand for alcohol. And I have misused it if, knowing it to stand for water, I use it as I would ‘alcohol’, say in order to mislead, irrespective of whether the sentences I employ state truths or falsehoods. Thus, if I say to the children, in the presence of my alcoholic friends, ‘These gentlemen are going to have a drink of this water’, indicating a bottle which I think harbours alcohol but which in fact is full of water, then again I have misused the word. In sum, it is what one understands by the word in the act of using it that determines whether the word has been misused. Only if one uses it as a designator of its actual designatum is it correctly used. Now there are various sorts of misunderstanding of natural-kind words, whether it be a misunderstanding of category, or a misunderstanding in which we confuse one designatum with another, or whatever it be. Then primary among the evidences of misunderstanding will, I suggest, be an apparent ignorance or disregard of original or contemporary ‘markers’. Thus, I might use ‘water’ on the supposition that its presence is criterially attested by certain specific sensory properties, which is probably a misunderstanding of category. Or use it to stand for alcohol, which is a misunderstanding of designatum. And so forth. The evidence for the first of these two misuses might perhaps be that I disregard all chemical and causal properties in identifying water; for the second that, somewhat like King Canute, when

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confronting the waves, I say: ‘I see no water.’ And so on. In either case I disregard an important ‘marker’. Namely: causal properties, contextual setting. (c) Why disregard of ‘markers’ tends to be indicative of misuse We have seen that disregard of ‘markers’ does not guarantee that one misuses a natural-kind word. On the other hand disregard or ignorance of those ‘markers’ constitutes the primary evidence of misuse. Then what determines that on some occasions it should, and on other occasions should not, indicate misuse? Let us here in (c) consider the rationale underlying these examples of misuse, and then in (d) a way in which one might escape the force of the ‘marker’ constraint. It helps to go over briefly the Putnam/Kripke account set out above. Aided in the first place by either a broad or a categorial type-concept like event or animal or material stuff, and generally assisted by ‘epistemological pointers’, some sector of an historically knit community of language-users picked out an existent local item under a determinate broad heading and attached a word to it, and this practice fixed the extension of the word. These pointers need not be criterial, but at a pre-scientific stage, and short of miraculous water-diviners and the like, they are all mankind has to go on. Therefore disregard of those pointers constitutes the prime evidence of misuse of a natural-kind word, and thus for the existence of a misunderstanding of sense. In the main, what we ask of the early pioneer co-users of depth natural-kind terms is a recognition of the existence and rough character of the non-criterial ‘markers’. And just as grasp and knowledge can obtain, so too in its stead can reign ignorance, confusion, and presumption. And just as there can be evidence of grasp, so too at a certain point it must be possible to accumulate evidence of misunderstanding of the term. Now it is evident that locale or contextual setting plays an especially significant part in marking the original ‘paradigms’, and that this particular ‘marker’ exerts a specific type of constraint upon subsequent use of the word. For example, even though the phenomenon of measles had been quite unambiguously discerned in man, we were initially reluctant to apply the concept across species. It is not that we would transgress any hard and fast or criterial rule were we to do so: what we affirm may be false, or even true; but an unthinking disregard of such judicious restraints at least suggests the absence of the very first requirement of grasping the sense of natural-kind words. I mean, possession of the finely meshed and properly developed conceptual framework that would automatically be entailed by comprehension of such generic or categorial terms as ‘event’, ‘material stuff’,

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‘vegetable’, ‘living object’. That is, the elemental system of concepts that we all employ. In the absence of this differential framework, only a vestigial version of the crucial baptismal ceremony can be enacted. Thus, some cases of disregard of ‘markers’, particularly on the part of young children, indicate that the subject in question is in possession of a relatively primitive system of categorial concepts. For example, a child so uses the word ‘tree’, say in applying the word to a plastic ‘tree’, that it is clear that visual appearance alone is for him a sufficient condition of tree-dom, and this evidences a misunderstanding of category. He allies himself to the public institution, usage of ‘tree’, but at the same time entertains beliefs which undermine the possibility of his grasping the sense of the word. More exactly, he fails to harbour sufficient knowledge to be able to enter into this particular communal linguistic activity. For these and other reasons, disregard of the ‘markers’ is strongly indicative of linguistic misuse. And yet we know that it is not an absolutely certain indicator of misuse. Then how might one manage to escape the constraint exerted by the markers? In what now follows in (d) we shall see how this might be achieved. And we shall see that the imagination can be a valuable aid to that end. (d) The imagination as both liberator from the ‘markers’ and gauge of sense The ‘markers’ constrain usage with an especial power in those contexts where there exists no depth knowledge of the item in question. Indeed, in certain situations, such as the putative application of the word ‘gold’ to a dirty-looking blue ooze by members of a tribal community, we may have reason for thinking the following. Such a community could not extend the extension of ‘gold’ onto this stuff without at that point snapping the very bond with the history of the term that sustains it in usage. (And yet it happened to be colloidal gold!) Since, ex hypothesi, we suppose that no one has any conception of any facts that could show this stuff to be gold, it is barely conceivable that the community and its metal specialists could retain their understanding of the word ‘gold’ and simultaneously suppose this ooze to be gold. When the ‘markers’ are thus stretched to breaking point, when the difficulty is not even realised, when connecting links to the line of the extension are in no way envisaged, then we would all of us judge that this community is in the process of losing its word ‘gold’. For cannot this happen to a community? Cannot it happen to a man? And is not this the prime evidence of such loss? Therefore if it were to be the case that a new and fanatical sect of metal specialists announced that their Bronze God

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had revealed to them that this stuff was gold, we would have good reason for believing that, thanks to doctrinal ‘enthusiasm’, they had lost their wits to the point of endangering a precious piece of public property, viz. the usage of ‘gold’ – and the very awareness of the reality of gold! For it seems almost certain that they are misusing the word. Though, of course, it is not entailed. It is merely fantastically likely. And the merest gesture towards the future, the merest of suspicions that ‘somehow the remote future will prove us right’, would instantly restore the situation. After all, geniuses crop up from time to time. Imagine a group of Ancient Sumerians to be talking about gold. One man, endowed with ‘the vivid and firm glance, marked by contemplation and thoughtfulness’1 of the genius, begins to speak. ‘All the gold we know comes from quartz in the nearby mountains. It is yellow, malleable, weighty, impervious to the passage of time, and altogether unresponsive to the embraces of even the most vigorous acids. And yet I dreamed that this stuff’ (here indicating something matching all these traits) ‘is not gold, and that this’ (here indicating a blue stuff that is not found in quartz), ‘is’. His staid colleagues begin to titter at such ‘rocking of the boat’, as if this inveterate trouble-maker had hypothesised that the tribal chief might be a transmuted frog. But are they strictly entitled to? It seems not, for at this point the dreamer-thinker proceeds to elaborate a revealing phantasy that opens the eyes of at least some. ‘Imagine’, he says, ‘a man possessed of a magical talisman which was such that, so long as one held it in one’s left hand, one gradually diminished in size, and in one’s right hand grew. Now suppose him standing upon various material substances and disappearing slowly into their depths; and doing such a thing countless times, so that the interior terrain of gold, silver, copper, were as familiar to him as the faces of his friends. Then one day, on entering into a piece of seeming gold, he discovers to his astonishment the unmistakable physiognomy of copper. Might not this stuff, contrary to all superficial appearances, really be copper? Indeed, might not the future, through the revelation of novel properties, confirm that it is?’ Now would not this man, through taking his dream as a literal possibility, have extended the horizons of his fellows? Would he not have creatively elaborated the sense of ‘a metal other than gold, with all the known properties of gold’? Did he not, and did they not, prior to the phantasy, fail to understand such a sentence? And yet it had a sense! And he did not invent the sense! In sum: a sentence of their language has a sense, no one 1

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation 1, Book iii, 36, New York: Dover, 1958.

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understands the sentence, and it requires a creative fable to spell out the sense? Then might not the task performed by that fable be carried out by a functioning scientist? Think, in this regard, of Freud, Heisenberg, Einstein. It seems that science can discover, not merely what is the sense of a term, but whether or not an expression has a sense. (e) Philosophically motivated misuse Now Philosophy is a rank breeding ground for the misuse of words. For we are all sensitive to the confusion-generating forces emanating from various perplexing regions of being. One such region is the dream. Think how the word ‘dream’ is used by those philosophers who suppose the waking report to be the sole and ultimate test of dreaming. These philosophers ought to hold that, if an electrical impulse at 4 a.m. into the brain of a sleeper were to erase all tendency to give dream reports, then necessarily no dream occurred between falling asleep and 4 a.m. Anyone who affirms this claim must both misunderstand and misuse the word ‘dream’. Thus, he cannot understand ‘dream’ to designate a mental phenomenon occurring in the midst of sleep. Yet since the word does precisely designate just such a phenomenon, this philosopher, as a result of morbid philosophical susceptibilty, loses his grasp of the word and uses it to do what it cannot do. In short, he misuses it. Now this is merely one example amongst others. But I mention it in order to stress how it is that forces emanating from a puzzling region of being can lead naturally to the misuse of language. I think we shall discover that the will is one of these regions. And the specific misuse I have in mind is one closely resembling the examples of misuse quoted above in which the ‘marker’ constraints are disregarded. In particular, the misuse that takes place when we wrench ourselves free of the important constraint of locale and setting, and attempt to extend the extension of ‘willed event’ beyond the confines of the body. I believe we shall find that here also – following in the footsteps of ‘the genius’ – the imagination can assist us in discovering whether and what the sense of the relevant expressions may be. 4. extending the will beyond the body (1): the problem (a) Does the sense of ‘will –’ impose a logical limit to such extension? Let us return to the original problem, and briefly review what has emerged. Is the body the final boundary of the will? My earlier suggestion was, that

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there exists in us all an inclination to say that it is. For I think there is an inclination to say that we cannot will the movement of extra-bodily material objects. Yet once we make this claim, a sense of confusion is apt to overtake us. For while on the one hand it seems evident that we cannot will the movement of (say) chairs, it on the other hand may strike us that this claim is not entirely pellucid. Then since the truth-value of a claim is a function of its sense, it looks as if we must make up our minds between the following two alternatives, according as we judge the above claim to have an agreed or else an indeterminate sense. Either it is true that we cannot will the movement of extra-bodily items, or else it is of indeterminate truthvalue. Thus, the problem of the truth-value of this claim finds itself linked with a problem concerning its sense. So let us now see whether we can spell out an acceptable sense for this claim. What do we understand by ‘I cannot will the movement of chairs’? Since there exist familiar acts of chair moving, the above can hardly be taken to say: no acts exist which fall under ‘the moving of a chair’. Then what is denied by ‘I cannot will the movement of chairs’? What is this putative act that is non-existent? The following explanation, which utilises the sense of ‘will –’ explicated in the glossary at the beginning of this work and elaborated in chapter 1, might be offered. As there is no act that I can perform that falls non-instrumentally under ‘moving my ears’, so there is no act that anyone can perform that falls non-instrumentally under ‘moving the chair’. Now has this made clear the sense of ‘I cannot will the movement of chairs’? Not, I think, as yet. At least two difficulties stand in the way. (A) This is the rather trivial difficulty posed by the fact that we are here obliged to speak of a non-existent natural-kind event. After all, bodily acts must rate as natural-kind events in some acceptable sense of the term. Then we encounter here a problem comparable to that of ‘empty names’. For if natural-kind terms get their sense through being indexically linked to concrete paradigms in determinate sectors of the world, how can it be intelligible to deny their existence? Well, from our point of view this question is neither here nor there. For to the question: ‘What is the act that is impossible?’, it might look as if we should say, as in the case of (say) the Abominable Snowman: ‘It is nothing.’ In short, it looks perhaps as if we should construe the logical form of, ‘No acts of willing extra-bodily events exist’, as comparable to that of ‘No abominable snowmen exist.’ We simply consign both monsters to the realm of mythology. And that seems to be that. (B) So problem (A), that we negate the existence of a natural-kind, is easily accommodated, and suggests a particular model for the logical form of

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‘No acts of willing extra-bodily events exist.’ Yet this raises a more serious problem (B). For we recognise that certain mythical monsters, say the Kracken or the Leviathan, might have been a reality. Indeed, we recognise that the first coiners of the word ‘unicorn’ might have sighted a beast with all the properties granted in myth to the mythical beast called ‘unicorn’, so that we would today have a word ‘unicorn’ with a sense generated by those original paradigms, and in this sense even the unicorn might have been real. Then can we analogously say: the willing of extra-bodily phenomena, while not a reality, might nonetheless have been a reality? I think the most natural reaction to this suggestion is, a firm rejection of the comparison. Then is it that we take the utterance, ‘We cannot will the occurrence of extrabodily phenomena’, to be necessarily true? That is, suppose the comparison with putative natural-kinds like abominable snowmen to be erroneous and assume instead that we are dealing with a further example of a logical limitation on the will? If so, we would be opting for a different model of logical form than is provided by ‘No abominable snowmen exist’, a logical form which expresses logical impossibility. This new account gives the proposition, ‘We cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects’, the truth-value, true. Then what has emerged as suspect about such an account is, not that we make mention of non-existent natural-kind entities, for think of abominable snowmen, nor even that we speak of necessarily non-existent natural-kind events, for think of a nonmiraculous ‘raising from the dead’. As noted earlier, it is that the sense of ‘We cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects’ has yet to be explicated. Thus, starting with the model of non-existent natural-kinds like abominable snowmen, we then swing over to the theory of necessary truth. And then we halt in our tracks. And we are right to do so. So we hover uncertainly between the two models. And this too is judicious. What can be the explanation of this state of affairs? I have claimed (above) that it turns upon the unclarity of the sense of ‘We cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects.’ But we shall see that it simultaneously reflects a peculiar two-facedness on the part of the concept of a physical action, a two-facedness regarding the a priori and the a posteriori. (b) The very special role of ‘markers’ in demarcating physical actions (1) There is a close similarity between the learning of the familiar naturalkind words and the learning of such expressions as ‘arm raising’. Here is an expression that gets pinned onto a determinate piece of reality, the act of limb moving: an event that is as ubiquitous as water, which stands in need

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neither of scientific discovery nor crucial baptismal ceremonies. Yet since the designating expression is part of a living language, and therefore necessarily endowed with a history, that expression must extend continuously back into a region of the past during which it acquired the sense to which we and it have to this day remained committed. Over some determinate stretch of time the expression acquired a definitive designatum. Now this must have been effected with the assistance of certain publicly accessible facts. I have in mind the following truths regarding an event like (say) arm raising. Thus: the event that ‘arm raising’ denotes is co-present with arm rise, occurs within the confines of the body, has characteristic internal predecessor events like desires, etc. Thanks to these facts a relation of designation was established. In short, here too there are ‘markers’ of a certain element in the world: ‘markers’ of a special kind no doubt, but indirect indicators for all that. (2) But at this point a complication arises. While non-rational animals pick out or notice bodily acts in other animals, just as they pick out natural-kinds like water and fellow animals, it is only possible for psychological events like bodily acts to be picked out in oneself and under the concepts of a language, when the first-person use of the designating expression has been learned. Equally, acts of arm raising on the part of a third-person other can be picked out under the concept of arm raising only when one has learned the use of ‘he raised his arm’ (or cognates). In short, if we are to understand the role of ‘markers’ in singling out this special type of natural-kind event, we must understand how we come to know when and how to use ‘I raised my arm’, ‘He raised his arm’. Before providing an answer to that question in the next section (3), let me first say a little more concerning the (internal and external ) ‘markers’, thanks to which we are apprised of the reality of acts of limb moving. That is, concerning the characteristic facts and phenomena which obtrusively accompany them. Thus, a movement/in a suitable part of the body (arm, say, rather than ear lobe)/matching desire-content and intentioncontent/accompanied by a seeming-to-the-subject-to-have-acted/etc. It is, I suggest, thanks to such data that limb movings have been linguistically demarcated. Then it is important to realise that the conjunction of these conditions does not entail the occurrence of limb moving. And yet all or almost all obtain when it occurs, and we all of us are aware of them. And if per impossibile mankind were to know none of them, we could have no knowledge of those active events. Therefore these conditions have a right to be designated ‘markers’, even though some are necessities. They are the ‘epistemological front’ presented to the world by a natural-kind event that we pick

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out under a concept. While the complexities of first- and third-person usage add an extra dimension to the problem, it is important that we hang onto the basic truth, that the event of arm-raising is an event that has for aeons been singled out under that concept by a concept-using creature, through the use of a set of features that fail to entail its presence. In short, by ‘markers’. (3) Now let us look at the related question: how do we learn to use ‘I raised my arm’? The subject learns to use this expression when certain mental conditions Cψ obtain, such as the presence of desire/intention/attempt/ seeming-to-oneself-to-have-acted/arm-rise-seeming-to-have-happened, and together with these mental conditions the external physical condition Cφ of limb movement. When some, or most, or all, of Cψ, are realised along with Cφ, then the subject has usually raised his arm, he is sometimes told he has raised his arm, he learns to pick it out under that concept, and he learns that he has and may say that he has raised his arm. This must be how it all begins, this must be the first stage: the learning process. Then this learning process involves a certain natural order of development. Thus, initially the internal conditions Cψ, assisted by the external condition Cφ, will act as undiscerned undifferentiated causes of the belief that one has and may rightly say that one has raised one’s arm. But thereafter certain necessary but non-sufficient conditions are explicitly differentiated, such as some at least of the internal conditions, Cψ, together with arm rise, Cφ; and at this point one learns that these newly discerned inner items, namely some or all of Cψ, can with the help of the already discerned outer item, Cφ, help to constitute a set of good evidential reasons for believing arm raising has occurred. And that completes the learning process. In other words, as the requisite internal conditions are at one stroke brought to the notice of and linguistically demarcated for the subject, they mutate from being mere causes to being rational causes of the belief that one has raised one’s arm. I could now state, but doubtless in early childhood could not, some of the interior or psychological reasons for believing that an event of arm rise that I see in my body is a willed arm rise. As developing self-consciousness makes inroads into the inner life, with the development of an increasing mastery of a battery of psychological concepts, so too does its helpmeet, reason. This seems to me the natural and inevitable order of development. Indeed, it is the path to, and a necessary pre-requisite of, freedom itself. Self-knowledge and self-determination coalesce in the concept of freedom. (4) Two facts stand out in the above account which bear directly on the present problem: (i) that the internal conditions Cψ, together with the

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external Cφ, constitute a non-sufficient set of conditions for the ‘marked’ event, and (ii) that one of the ‘markers’ of this natural-kind event is the occurrence of movement in a suitable part of the body, e.g. jaw rather than hair. Now it will be noted that (i) implies that we do not have a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for arm raising, even though we are aware of some of those necessary conditions. Equally significantly, (ii) is a contextual requirement, comparable with the contextual requirement imposed by the fact that resin was discovered in the arboreal vegetable domain. In short, for all the idiosyncratic peculiarities of the first-person psychological use, the situation is interestingly similar to that obtaining with the familiar natural-kinds of the physical sciences. Namely, by the use of certain ‘markers’ we fallibly pick out an item, of whose essence we are ignorant, in a restricted or favourable setting. Then what are we to say of the situation when, not merely cutting across the distinction, suitable/unsuitable-part-of-the-body, we take the φ event that is ‘done’ or ‘willed’ outside the very confines of the body? That is, when we apply the term in a context radically removed from its matrix context? Have we probably or almost certainly or absolutely certainly misused language? Or have we, perhaps, uttered an incomprehensible sentence that has a sense we cannot as yet divine: one that the future will unravel; and possibly even realise for it the truth-value, true? 5. extend ing the will beyo nd t he body (2): the ex pl anation (a) Jettisoning the evidential ‘marker’ of setting (or ‘dropping the pilot’, or ‘venturing into the interstellar space of the concept’) Let me review the situation. Arm raisings are events that stand in a certain relation to lost ancient and contemporary paradigms, whose (real? nominal? but in any case) essence is unknown: the relation of being of the same act-type. The extension of ‘arm raising’ is determined by these paradigms, which are in turn identified by ‘markers’ which constitute good but not infallible evidence for the presence of the event. High amongst these latter evidences is the setting of the event: the animal body. This important ‘marker’ guarantees much, conferring weight upon evidence that would otherwise be of dubious value. But we then intemperately decide to jettison this evidential anchor, to venture outside into a sort of conceptual interstellar space. We try to extend ‘arm raising’ as far as ‘chair raising’, we hope to lead the line of extension beyond the confines of the body, rather as space voyagers might lead the extension of ‘water’ beyond the Earth, where

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it is held together by phenomenal properties and setting, as far as a pulsar in M31. Now this extrapolation of ‘water’ is unexceptionable, and in no way sets the head spinning, even though certain seemingly rash uses of ‘water’ on M31 (say) might evidentially indicate misunderstanding of the principles governing its use. It is unexceptionable for a simple reason. Thus, it is evident that the following question may in such novel circumstances always legitimately be pressed: ‘how do we know that, having crossed this important barrier, one can still find this particular item on the other side?’ And if one is armed with no more than ‘markers’, if one is completely bereft of criteria, that can be a very serious problem. However, in our present era the criteria for water are well known, and it is well known that they are well known. Therefore even though it should have troubled our ancestors, venturing into that outer space poses no difficulty for contemporary users of the word ‘water’. And it is, in any case, a scientific rather than philosophical problem whether water exists beyond the Earth. The situation is different in the case of ‘chair raising’. Thus, the assertion that ‘some day we might will the movement of articles of furniture’ is opaque and perplexing, somewhat as is the claim that ‘robots might be invented that can feel pain’. Further, it is at the least to ask a philosophical question if we say: ‘Can the will be extended beyond the body?’ Therefore we would do well to guard against a too facile assimilation of this problem to that posed by the extension of ‘water’ beyond its original matriarchal locus. The situations have important dissimilarities. And yet we know also that they are alike in certain ways. For we have seen that, in the absence of any idea how one might come by the criteria for ‘water’, injudicious applications of the word might betray, not mere rashness of temperament, but a short-term departure from the use of this word, wrought no doubt by the extreme novelty of the application conditions and mediated by bad linguistic theory of the ‘cluster’ type. Then per impossibile were this latter idiosyncratic situation universalised, a philosophically interesting state of affairs would inevitably be realised. I suggest that this is the position when we try to take ‘– raising’ into its extra-bodily ‘outer space’. (b) Linguistic misuse as the inevitable result (1) To say: ‘It is certain we never will the movement of objects’ or ‘It is certain we will eventually do so’, is, I suggest, akin in certain respects to rashly labelling material stuffs on M31 merely on the basis of their superficial properties. What we should note here is the automatic assumption that the

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past history of a word provides us with an instant recipe for identifying novel phases of its extension, altogether irrespective of contextual setting. While such utterances as the above are not of necessity of such a character, if they are then it is reasonable to make the empirical non-philosophical surmise that they constitute misuses of language. But why waste time over such linguistic misdemeanours? Precisely because we all offend on this count. For most people experience an inclination to say that extra-bodily phenomena elude the control of the will, and this is already a sort of mental misuse of language. Whether or not ‘the willing of the extra-bodily’ has an agreed sense, it has no agreed use, for there is no agreement in linguistic practice when ‘willed event’ is applied beyond the limits of the body. Then in making such claims people misuse action-expressions, not because they ‘rashly assume they have application in novel and extreme circumstances’, possibly because they apply them ‘in circumstances for which they were not designed’, and in any case certainly because in speaking so they are labouring under a mistaken philosophical theory of the will. For here we have precisely the kind of situation Wittgenstein had in mind when he spoke of the need for ‘philosophical cure’: a philosophically perplexing situation which so acts upon us as to engender a tendency to deflect the language from its ordinary use into the realms of misuse. My suggestion is, not that ‘We cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects’ lacks a sense and truth-value. I merely claim: if it has, we can only know through inquiry. And that if by ‘agreed use’ we mean an agreement in the designatory practices of the speakers of a language, then in this extrabodily ‘interstellar space’ action words have no agreed use. Therefore when people employ these terms in that unfamiliar extra-bodily region, they inevitably misuse them. This is not to say that ‘will chair rise’ has a sense, but rather that whether or not it has a sense, we do not know of one. Thus, if we are to discover whether this expression has a sense, we should not automatically consult the deliverances of our understanding. And in fact in the case of this particular problem we are obliged to look elsewhere. Then while science is in a sense that we will later elaborate peculiarly relevant, it is ultimately to philosophy that we must look. (2) Thus, the pernicious step is the assumption that, when we wish to discover if an expression has a sense, our understanding must immediately ‘deliver the goods’. And so there is a strong tendency to ‘jump the gun’. For we look within and deliver on-the-spot judgements like ‘Willing the extra-bodily is conceivable’ or ‘Necessarily, such willing is impossible.’ This

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‘hair-trigger’ reaction betrays one of the sources of the present philosophical perplexity, indeed of the radical volitionism that deeply determines that puzzlement: namely, the assumption that a concept directly determines the extension of natural-kind terms. For if you suppose this, you will naturally assume that, like a Lockean ‘mixed mode’ such as parricide, items find their way into the extension of ‘will –’ simply by matching their features to the specifications laid down by the concept in the understanding. Thus, the natural depth present in the designatum passes unnoticed. It is assumed that the mind harbours a translucent image of the make-up of the physical action – as it does of thoughts and images and sensations – else it could not so successfully identify countless examples of the kind, and that it must without more than a brief inward glance into its own contents be able to deliver a decisive judgement concerning this present philosophical puzzle. You say: ‘I am looking for the extension of “willed event” in this strange new extra-bodily terrain’; and you add: ‘I am looking for something, out here beyond the body, that stands in the same relation to my desires as does that’ (pointing to the movement of a limb that one is willingly moving), and you then proceed to consult a concept which you have in your mind! This resort to the mind when faced with a crisis in the extension of a natural-kind term, strongly suggests an idealistically oriented philosophy of Nature. We shall even discover that it has magical commitments. (3) As one assumes one must recognise life, no matter what its setting, so one assumes one must recognise willings wherever they occur. For one assumes one has the necessary and sufficient criteria at immediate beck and call in one’s mind. Yet just as new forms of evidence are required if we are to identify water on M31 or resin in an animal, since our initial criteria for water or resin were mere ‘epistemological pointers’ whereas the actual criteria lay buried in the depths of Nature and required to be unearthed, so in many ways it is with action. (With important reservations, soon to be elaborated.) We must begin by recognising that the ‘epistemological markers’ are not the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of willed events – of which in fact we and the public are ignorant, and make ready to look long and searchingly not merely into the mind but out into Nature at large. This is the first step, coming to understand that Nature must be consulted if we are to identify extensions of the extension into such novel regions. The second is to see that this is in no way inconsistent with the fact that it is to philosophy that we must look if we are to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for the willing of phenomena. For the ultimate constituents of physical action, unlike those of gold/water/life, are

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pre-scientifically, indeed a priori given. In this sense the concept of physical action is an a priori concept, but one which stands nonetheless in need of a posteriori-given application-conditions. In short, determining the extension of the extension is in this way a joint enterprise. (c) On the special reasons why this problem calls for philosophical-cum-scientific resolution, viz. a priori concept and a posteriori conditions of application (1) Thus, scientific findings are decidedly relevant to the enterprise of discovering whether the will can be extended beyond the body. Yet having taken note of this fact, it is important that we emphasise the equally significant fact that, despite important similarities, the problem facing us is markedly different from that of extending the use of ‘water’, ‘gold’, ‘life’ from here on Earth to somewhere in M31. As remarked above, these are merely empirical questions with determinate answers, waiting upon scientific discovery. But our question is philosophical. It therefore seems that, while the findings of scientific inquiry must be consulted if we are to discover whether the will can be extended beyond the body, what is first needed is philosophical elucidation of the concept of physical action. This is because of the following special features of the act situation – in contradistinction with that obtaining with familiar natural-kinds. 1. The fact that some of the ‘epistemological pointers’ of limb moving acts are logical necessities, e.g. the occurrence of limb movement. 2. That not all these necessities are trivially obvious, but are instead matters for argument and analysis, e.g. the cognitive conditions of action. 3. That they are part of an a priori-given sufficient set, which is only to be discovered through philosophical investigation. 4. That they stand in need of a posteriori-given conditions of application: say, through understanding of the body’s mechanisms. While feature (4) shows that science must be consulted if we are to stand a chance of extending the extension of ‘willed movement’ in the projected manner, (1) indicates the need to consult the contents of our own minds as well. But (2) and (3) show that this must consist, not in the mere throwing of an inward glance, but in an attempted unravelling of the concept of bodily action. More, it must consist in a philosophical dismantling of that concept. Then since the community of speakers cannot be expected to engage in this enterprise when they ask the question: Can the will be extended beyond the body?, we have a right to say that some kind of interim or philosophical limit exists to the exertion of the will beyond the body. If they cannot but

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damn themselves whenever they open their mouths, better to refrain from speech. Better that the expression ‘the willing of extra-bodily phenomena’ be proscribed. This possibly temporary, possibly permanent, ‘black listing’, is, already, a sort of limit. (2) My reaction to the line of thought according to which merely the concept in the understanding determines the extension of ‘willed event’, was to say that the natural depth present in the designatum would thereby pass unnoticed. A word about this ‘natural depth’. It is of two kinds: physical and mental. Thus, there is a hidden physical depth in physical actions, and we are committed by the history of active terminology to recognising that this factor plays a part in determining the extension of ‘willed event’. But of even greater interest to my way of thinking is the mental depth, since it seems to be of a special sort, such that only philosophy can reveal what lies hidden. It is not just that ‘will . . .’ is unlike a ‘mixed mode’ like ‘parricide’. I suggest that the depth in question is not such as to be there and then plumbed through introspection, even by a vastly intelligent mind that can see into concepts with a crystal clarity consonant with its intellect. The processes of philosophy have no such intellectual equivalent. Rather it is as if there were a sort of collective public conceptual ‘unconscious’, which nothing but philosophical analysis is capable of unlocking. In my opinion, this unravelling is essentially processive, essentially extended over time, essentially philosophical – and essentially dialectical in character. (d) The state of play The position we have reached is this. The extension of ‘willed event’ is, so to speak, a line made up of countless instances. It is like a clear track left by an animal in the dust. And now we see that this track has led right to the edge of a jungle, and we seek to map its further convolutions. But various tracks are visible in the undergrowth: we do not know which is its track; nor even whether it left a track in such terrain. Thus, an historical continuity links the early uses of ‘willed event’ with the present, but for the first time we seem in danger of losing the thread. What is one to do? The answer is, that it requires a specialist in such matters. What is needed is a philosopher with a land-line to scientists. And we note that until this inquiry is undertaken, no one can be presumed to use the expression ‘willed event’ in this terrain with suitable comprehension. ‘The will can/cannot be extended beyond the body’, is not, ab initio and pre-reflectively, comprehensible. Yet it need not be assumed that these two opposed claims lack truth-values, and that we

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shall be doing no more than engage in stipulation: that is, self-consciously forge a development in the use and sense of a term. This may well be all that we shall do; but the issue must not be pre-judged. I believe that the matter is, rather than evidently a priori possible or impossible, for the moment a priori indeterminate. If I am to resolve the problem of limits, I must first dismantle the concept of bodily action into its constituent parts. Yet I shall in what follows reverse the order of procedure. I shall instead build up piecemeal an instance of physical action. And I shall do this with one eye trained on the question: Can the will be extended beyond the body? Thus, I shall be feeling my way towards possibly possible truth-conditions for ‘He willed an extra-bodily phenomenon’, without knowing in advance what will be the final outcome. And I expect the point of resolution of the physical action into its criterial constituents, and the point of resolution of this puzzle, precisely to coincide. Constituting the physical action, and mapping the new convolutions in the line of the extension of ‘willed event’, are for me one enterprise. And it is worth noting: this is a trail one cannot pick up by accident. But before I embark on that journey a word on a philosophical theory that conjures up an entire imagery of mind and body, a theory which is very closely linked with our problem. (e) The volition In what follows in Part I, I speak much of ‘volitionism’. Now this word might be used to stand for any one of a series of theories of bodily action – including the theory endorsed by me in Part III. But my concern in using this term here in Part I is to delineate the first of several ‘moments’ in what could be called ‘a dialectical history of theories of bodily action’. For it is my belief that philosophical theories of action have a natural order of development, and that they relate to one another in quasi-dialectical fashion, in that each theory negates or ‘goes beyond’ a less developed predecessor theory in such a way as to incorporate its insights and shed its errors. Now the most primitive theory of action, indeed a theory at a pre-philosophical stage, is the doctrine that bodily actions are mere movements of the body that somehow owe their existence to certain requisite psychological phenomena. Then philosophy of action begins with the opposed insight that physical action has an inner life of its own, and this insight finds expression in a radically interiorist theory of the will, a theory which is Cartesian in spirit. The theory in question claims that there exist acts of the will that are of the same ontological status as thoughts (‘a power to begin . . . motions

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of our bodies, barely by a thought or preference of the mind, or as it were commanding . . .’, as Locke expressed it), that stand to their distinct body event-object in a relation which is at once causal, immediate, and mysterious. This somewhat primitive account of action – which I might have named ‘Metaphysical volitionism’, since it is both non-naturalist in outlook and ‘badly metaphysical’ – is what I am here in Part I calling ‘volitionism’. Then in chapter 4 I go on to distinguish within theories of this type the all but most radically interiorist and primitive variety of the kind, while in chapter 7 I plumb what is perhaps the nadir of such doctrines. It follows from the above that the whole of Part I must be seen as an attempt at freeing the mind from the binding power of these extreme interiorist theories. That is, as an attempt to advance towards the next ‘moment’ of the dialectic. This I believe I accomplish by the end of Part II.

chapter 3

Extending the will beyond the body

At the end of the previous chapter I announced my intention of attempting to extend the extension of ‘willed event’ beyond the boundaries of the body, and claimed that this would be one and the same process as that of attempting piecemeal to constitute the concept of a physical action. How best to proceed in this enterprise? I think these joint tasks are best approached in a spirit of philosophical innocence. Accordingly, I shall begin at the beginning with the question: can the will be extended beyond the body? And I will attempt to approach this question afresh and without pre-conception. 1. at tempting to ex pl ain ‘i can will ex tra-bod ily events’ (a) Volitionism and the putative extension of the will beyond the body (1) Occasionally we hear of a situation where someone claims to have ‘willed someone to perform a certain action’. This is a puzzling and obscure thing to say. What is it to will people to do things? What precisely is one supposed to do? How, for example, should I go about willing that Mr X move his head? Am I to think about his moving his head, to murmur again and again in a stern voice: ‘Move your head, X!’ Or am I, instead, somehow or other to try to make myself strongly desire that he move his head, and hope that, through empathetic compulsion, that desire proves efficacious? It is possible that these are the sorts of things meant by one who speaks of ‘willing X to move his head’, in which case we would have been informed of two possible ways of using ‘will – to move’; and in both cases this description would be functioning as an instrumental re-description of acts falling noninstrumentally under other descriptions. But suppose these instrumental uses are rejected as insufficiently immediate. Suppose it is claimed that it is possible to operate one’s will in moving extra-bodily objects in an identical 97

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manner to the way we operate our will when we move our own heads. It would, of course, be admitted that this is a difficult, and doubtless a rare thing to do. Nevertheless, it might be said, there is some chance that with practice and dedication we will gradually improve at operating our will on objects lying beyond the body. After all, has not this happened to certain mediums and mystics? (2) But what sort of a notion is that of ‘improving at operating one’s will’? In the present ‘telekinetic’ situation, the expression is strongly reminiscent of (say) ‘improving at throwing one’s voice’. Indeed, we may well be interpreting it on the model of such an expression. That is, taking ‘operating one’s will on entity y’ to consist in the doing of a covert private activity that, somehow or other, and at some sort of distance, wreaks some desired effect in entity y. Then even if this were a merely stipulative proposal, the facts of usage and thus also of mankind’s classification of certain phenomena as actions, seem to lend it no support. In the first place, since the word ‘will’ is to be explicated through the word ‘do’, and we are not aware of any such private ‘doing’ when we move our limbs, the stipulation might lack application in the most central of all cases. Secondly, since there exists a variety of uses of ‘do’, this stipulation fails to do justice to the variegation in the natural possible ways of using ‘will’: it provides a single monolithic interpretation of ‘operating one’s will on . . .’ in the face of this multiplicity. This deficiency whereby the stipulation appears to conflict with the known facts pertaining to action, is doubly a flaw when the stipulation is determined by a false and metaphysical theory of action. I think we are liable to offer this monolithic interpretation if, wedded to the volition theory of action set out at the end of the last chapter, we take ‘willing’ to name an interior mental act which somehow causes whatever physical phenomena we actively do. That is, if we spiritualise bodily action, situating it in the inner world, and splitting it off from its manifestative bodily phenomena. Such an inner-to-outer action-at-distance theory leads naturally to the view that willing (or ‘doing’) the movement of limbs relates to willing (or ‘doing’) the movement of extra-bodily objects, as does normal speaking to the throwing of one’s voice: if a mental force can act on a limb, why not in principle on a nearby object? Thus, the volition theory of action promotes the idea that, since all action is said to be a producing by means of volit-ing, there can merely be a difference of degree between volit-ing limb movement and the mysterious putative volit-ing of movement in extra-bodily objects. In short, it bemuses us into an uncritical acceptance of the unexplained and deeply confusing expression, ‘the willing of change

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beyond the body’. For the interiorist volitionist account of bodily action underlies this entire problem. It would follow from such a theory of action that ‘trying to do an event x in object y’ should be understood as ‘the performing of an act of will’ – an interior event of voliting – ‘directed at y in the hope of producing x’. Thus, trying would on this monolithic view always consist in the same kind of phenomenon: the performing of an internal act of the will. Then on the face of it, such a theory looks to be in difficulties, to clash with the known facts concerning trying. For it is evident that in some cases trying consists in the employment of overt manipulative techniques, say when we try to open a door by giving it a kick, while in other cases trying is a covert and non-manipulative event, say when we try to move a paralysed limb. Moreover, it is precisely these latter cases – those in which we try to move a limb – that are supposed to provide the inroad into the sense of ‘Try to will that chair to move.’ Through this important distinction between the varieties of physical tryings, I hope to make the peculiarity of this order more apparent, and explain why it leaves us perplexed. (b) Searching for the model use of ‘I can . . .’ for the extra-bodily act Let us return to the suggestion that we might learn to ‘operate the will on extra-bodily objects’. How are we to understand this claim? We are told it is modelled on ‘I can will the movement of my arm’, rather than on instrumentalist expressions like familiar uses of ‘Moving the piano’. Yet this advice suffers from the same flaw that tainted the earlier monolithic stipulative proposal: it fails to notice an unresolved indeterminacy in ‘I can will the movement of my arm’. For there are several uses of ‘I can move my arm’ – which is the expression that is supposed to give the sense of ‘I can will the movement of my arm.’ Therefore if I am to specify the model for ‘I can will the movement of extra-bodily objects’, I must first set out these several uses and then identify the use that is to serve as model. It emerges after a little investigation that there exist no more than three main uses of ‘I can move my arm’, two of which I now characterise, along with their occasion of use. (The third follows in due course.) (θ1) This is a simple enough case. I would say ‘I cannot move my leg’ if it were trapped under a log. Here something external to the motor-mechanism of the act-power prevents an act of limb moving: a state of affairs which is consistent with retention of the power to act with the limb – so that in such a situation one might try to move one’s leg by pushing against something. This use of ‘I cannot move my leg’ does not affirm the loss of active power

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over the limb, which is to say loss of the capacity to move it in conditions of physical liberty. Instead, it lets us know that it is precisely these conditions that here and now fail to obtain. This is its specific function. (θ2) A second more fundamental use of ‘I cannot move my arm’ would find application if someone was recovering the use of a hitherto paralysed arm. We can ask this person to try and move the limb, and he may or may not succeed. One difference between this and the previous (θ 1) example is, that whereas the subject in (θ1) tried by pushing, in the present case one cannot say what trying consists in: one can do no more than repeat ‘I tried to move my arm’, which is the closest and best possible description of the event. And a second dissimilarity to the first (θ1) use lies in the fact that in the present (θ 2) case the cause of act-incapacity lies within the motormechanism of the act-power, and is such as to prevent any kind of active use of the limb. Then the specific function of this use of ‘I cannot . . .’ is to let us know that it is precisely this mechanistic basis of active power that is absent. These two uses of ‘I cannot . . .’ explicate the θ1 and θ2 uses of ‘I can move a limb.’ And these uses of this one expression are linked, for the θ1 use in the first place affirms all that the θ2 use affirms, and in the second place affirms the obtaining of the standing conditions in which the bodybased power claimed in the θ 2 use may manifest itself. Accordingly, θ1-type claims can be true only if θ2-type claims are true, though not vice versa. (c) Distinguishing the several uses of ‘I can . . .’ from its unitary sense (1) The fact that we are here concerned with two uses of ‘I can/cannot move this limb’, is clear when one remembers that a man with his arm trapped under a log could there and then say to a surgeon who had recently treated that arm: ‘I have recovered the use of my arm’ and ‘I can play the violin once more’, and ‘While I can now move my arm, I have still not recovered use of my left little finger’, and suchlike. It follows that he could at one and the same time say: ‘I can here and now move my arm’ and ‘It is not true that I can here and now move my arm’; one remark blithely and gratefully addressed to the doctor to whom he is speaking by telephone, the other hissed at a complacent nearby fireman-rescuer who had the temerity to suggest that he stood in no need of assistance from anyone. The first (θ2-type) utterance conveys the information that a bodily state now exists which is such that, in conditions of physical liberty, trying is a sufficient condition of success: it affirms the presence of a body-based active power. The second (θ1-type) utterance conveys the information that the conditions of liberty do not obtain which would permit the exercise of that power: it affirms the

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presence of a here and now restraint upon such power. Neither utterance clashes with other. Like ships in the night, they ignore one another. (2) This is not because the sentences have diverse senses. For we cannot argue from a diversity in the uses of ‘I can move my arm’, to a diversity in its senses. What is truly diverse is the multiplicity of uses of this one sentence, together with the multiplicity of presumed contexts which make possible such variegation in use. There can be no doubt that the sense of ‘I can move my arm’ is determinate and unitary across these uses, and that this sentence affirms pre-contextually, and therefore in and of itself, that trying is a sufficient condition of arm moving. Yet this fact readily misleads us into supposing that there is a context-free usage-less (so to say) use of the sentence: a use corresponding to the presumed monolithic efficacy of the psychic volit-ing of the volitionist! Whereas in actual fact the specific information that is to be conveyed can be transmitted only when this sentence is fed into one of several possible contextual frames, which of necessity it must be if it is to have a verification and truth-value. Until that moment one should have to say, concerning a claim that ‘I can move my arm’, that one does not as yet understand the claim. After all, θ2 says that if liberty prevails trying suffices, whereas θ1 says that liberty does prevail and trying suffices if liberty prevails. They make different claims. That the sense of ‘I can . . .’ is unitary across these claims, is evident when one recalls that the sense-conveyed information is fixed prior to one’s going on to offer a simultaneous completion and explanation of what it is being used to say. Thus, someone who knew both that this man’s arm had recently been paralysed and was possibly now trapped under a log, and who overheard his remark ‘I can move my arm’, would whatever else take this claim to be logically equivalent to, ‘Trying to move my arm, by me, will succeed.’ Nonetheless, he would not yet know whether arm-recovery or arm-recovery-plus-liberty was being affirmed. It is not that he thinks the words ‘try’, ‘move’, ‘will succeed’ are ambiguous, nor that he believes that the sentences have different logical forms. He knows which logical equivalences obtain, yet still does not know whether the assistance of a fireman or no assistance at all is called for by this man’s situation. He does not know the verification or truth-conditions of the utterance whose constituent terms he understands and whose logical form he knows. In short, to the diverse uses of ‘I can move my arm’, there corresponds no matching diversity of senses. And this is liable to escape our notice, because the sense-conveyed and context-conveyed information form a tight and barely dissoluble whole, so structured that the latter constitutes the

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completion of the former. The unitary sense of ‘I can move my arm’ is ‘Trying by me now to move my arm will be successful.’ Yet, as we have seen, as it stands this remark is incomplete, for it stands in need of supplementation by a statement of the prevailing conditions. Only then does it acquire a verification and in that sense also a truth-value, even though the claim can be understood and known to have a determinate truth-value prior to knowledge of those conditions. Thus, this sense-conveyed information has necessarily to be accompanied by contextconveyed information if it is to make a determinate claim. The whole that they form is the information that the utterance normally conveys, and all of this enters into the characterisation of some one use of ‘I can move my arm.’ (3) We translate the statement transmitted down the telephone to the surgeon that ‘I can now move my arm’, as ‘Trying by me now to move my arm will succeed, in conditions of physical liberty.’ And we translate the statement hissed at the complacent fireman-rescuer that ‘I cannot now move my arm’ as: ‘Trying by me now to move my arm will be unsuccessful – in the prevailing conditions.’ Then it is evident that these two remarks, despite a seeming contradiction in their first clause, can hold of the one individual at the same time. Thus, we can see how the sense of the sentence ‘I can/cannot move my arm’ is unitary, how such an utterance necessarily requires completion, and how the wrong information is necessarily conveyed if the wrong completion is understood to obtain. This permits, not its being both true and false that he can at some particular time t move his arm; but two utterances, one true, one false, using the same sentence in the same sense, viz. ‘I can now move my arm.’ The fact that he can at one and the same time say ‘I can/cannot now move my arm’, and that the senses of each of these utterances is unitary, constitutes a firm proof of the incompleteness of these claims. It proves that they require a contextual frame if they are to make a determinate claim. To sum up: we have here an important logical phenomenon that can cause some confusion. Namely, the one sentence with unitary sense can convey information which, while essentially incomplete, can be both true and known pre-contexually to true; and paradoxically, this can be so only if the information is set in a contextual frame which at one stroke completes it. Out of such a logical phenomenon grows the phenomenon of use. The metaphysical tendency to shed the very notion of use, leads naturally to the assumption of a single usage-less usage. The result is a Polyphemus-like vision of a region of being: metaphysical monocular vision! (Volitionism being one such.)

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(d) Settling on the model-use: its implications for extra-bodily tryings (1) Let us resume the task of setting out the three central uses of ‘I can move my arm.’ So far we have encountered two uses, one characteristically employed in medical, the other in restraining contextual circumstances. What of the third? This (θ 3) is the instrumentalist use. It finds application when I use one of my limbs (or, indeed, merely my mind actively) instrumentally to effect the movement of one of my arms. For example, I use my left arm to raise my right arm, and thereby perform one act that falls under two descriptions: ‘raising the left arm’, ‘raising the right arm’. Then the latter is an example of this third (θ 3) instrumentalist use. In sum we have three uses of the expression, conveying in turn the following information. (θ 1) The necessary conditions of physical liberty obtain requisite for the exercise of an inhering basic power to move my arm. (θ2) Trying to move my arm is, in conditions of physical liberty, a sufficient condition of arm moving. (θ 3) I have the power to perform acts which, through causing arm movement, fall instrumentally under ‘moving my arm’.1 From which of these uses are we to derive the problematic use of ‘I can will the movement of extra-bodily objects’? Suppose the following is claimed: ‘When I can will the movement of a chair, this is an extension of the will in the way in which being able to move one’s ears in the immediate way we move our legs and arms, would constitutute an extension of the will’s powers.’ In this special usage ‘I can move that chair’ is to be opposed to the most familiar use of ‘I cannot move my ears’, just as ‘I cannot move the sun’ is to be opposed to ‘I can move my feet.’ In short, use (θ2) is to provide the model. (2) We are here supposedly apprised of the information conveyed by the utterance: ‘I can will the movement of extra-bodily objects.’ And it is moreover confidently asserted that, at the present moment, we lack the power to move the sun! Ought this to satisfy us? But there is something amiss here. For how can we find out whether this latter claim is true rather than false? How can it be known? ‘By trying to move the sun and failing’, it is replied; ‘for we have recently noticed the logical equivalence of act-capacity and trying formulations.’ And yet this is easier said than done, because of the obscurity 1

A fourth (θ4) act-use of ‘I can . . .’, is the ‘constitutive’ use of ‘I can . . .’, e.g. ‘I can contract my biceps by moving my arm.’ It should be noted that all four uses of ‘I can . . .’ have intentional and unintentional applications. For example, the constitutive use would be applied in the unintentional mode when we say of someone: ‘when he intentionally moved his arm he unbeknown performed the constitutive act of biceps-contracting’. Here ‘biceps-contracting’ re-describes the intentional act of arm moving.

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in the concept of trying to do such a something. I will try to bring this out in what follows. Suppose we ask someone to try and move the lobe of one of his ears; and suppose he tells us that, having obeyed the order, he found himself unable to move it. Then what we asked him to do was such that we cannot ask him to keep on continuously doing whatever he then did – by contrast with what we ask of a man who (say) tries to open a jammed door. This example of trying is markedly unlike those active situations in which trying to move a limb involves the use of instrumental means: say, trying to move one’s ear by tensing one’s cheek. It appears to be at once featureless, mysterious, and simple. Then it is precisely this use of ‘I am trying to will movement in this part of my body’ that has been taken as model-use for the claim that we might extend the will beyond the body. And since trying in such cases is no common or garden act, indeed in all probability is nothing but trying to move the limb, this must in part explain our confusion when asked to try and will the movment of items of furniture. For we are asked to perform an act of trying, marked by these special non-instrumental features, that is directed at a lump of wood! At once all ritualistic and ‘spooky’ procedures fall to one side – being instrumentalist in type – leaving apparently nothing! Once we are told that ‘I can will the movement of the table’ is to be opposed to the central or θ 2-use of ‘I cannot move my ears’, there is nothing we can even pretend to do if we are asked to obey the order: ‘Try and will the movement of that table.’ So how can we try to will the movement of the sun? So how can we try and fail to move the sun? Indeed, how can we try and fail to move anything of an extra-bodily nature? 2. an ex tensionalist test f or metaphysical volitionism (a) A clash between metaphysical and ordinary usage on the score of extension (1) We are trying to get the explanation of the metaphysical use of ‘I can exert my will beyond my body’, or, in particular, of ‘I can will the movement of extra-bodily objects.’ This use is said to be a continuation of ‘I can move my arms, leg, jaw, . . .’, but one of the main outcomes of the recent discussion has been the realisation that this does not constitute a sufficient explanation of that use. Rather as one might say of someone who explained his use of ‘The robot is in pain’ by claiming that this expression, when applied to an agitated and damaged and self-repairing robot, was a continuation of ‘This man is in pain’, ‘This cat is in pain’, ‘This lobster is

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in pain’ . . . – that he had not as yet adequately explained what he meant in using this expression. My main concern in this discussion has been with a certain famous theory of the will that leads us to believe in the unproblematic extension of the domain of efficacy of the will into regions lying beyond the body. I mean: a Cartesian-ish action-at-distance theory which posits a sort of mental analogue of Magnetism. This theory offers an analysis of physical action, supposedly providing an account of the principles governing the use of active terms. Then since the theory is false, postulating the occurrence of a mythical active interior event whenever we physically act, trouble ought to appear in the actual or potential extension of active terms when put to such volitionist uses. That is, since volitionism is intentionally at variance with ordinary usage, an extensionalist clash with ordinary usage ought eventually to come to the surface: a clash that is in effect a disproof of volitionism. Thus, we ought in this way to have an extensionalist test of volitionism. Indeed, it was with this end in view that I first addressed myself to the question: can the will be extended beyond the body? For here we go beyond the actual extension of ‘willed event’ into the realms of potential extension. Then in this special and highly artificial extensionalist ‘test area’ an interesting situation arises. Namely, ordinary language finds itself (so to say) at a loss, it does not know what to say in answer to the above question. By contrast, an unhealthy decisiveness characterises the response of volitionism to this same question. I think this a revealing divergence. It suggests that all is not well with volitionism. Thus, there is a clash between ordinary usage and the proposed metaphysical usage on the score of potential extension. It constitutes what might be called ‘extension trouble’ for that novel usage. But we shall soon see that extension trouble also exists for volitionism on the score of the actual extension of active terms. For once we come to consider the instrumental act, whether it be within or without the body, we shall see that the volition theory dictates a use of language that is at this point extensionally at variance with ordinary usage. In short, volitionism is extensionally in disagreement with ordinary usage in two distinct regions of use. Now in attempting to explain the very special metaphysical use of active terms that is prompted by volitionism, it is natural that we should concentrate on those places where it is thus extensionally at odds with ordinary usage. Then clearly there is agreement concerning the most familiar instances of limb moving; so that for example ordinary language and volitionist language agree that the movement of one’s legs when one walks is something that is actively ‘done’. However, we have just noted that disagreement appears both over the putative immediate extra-bodily act and the instrumental act. Accordingly, it is

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at those two places that the proposed volitionist usage is most naturally to be taught and learned. (2) To return to the theme of the present section (2)(a). We are trying to get the explanation of the metaphysical use of ‘I can exert my will on something other than my body’; so far without success. Alternatively, we are attempting to explain the metaphysical or volitionist use of ‘I can will φ’ by considering a domain for φ that falls well outside the actual domain, and hoping by these extensional considerations to illuminate the deep nature of what occurs when φ lies within the actual domain. As yet, this procedure has failed to achieve anything, for it is hardly possible that we can explain the familiar by the unexplained unfamiliar. How could we explain arm-raising by the problematic willing of extra-bodily phenomena? Now whatever phenomena we are prepared to say we can will must at the very least be phenomena that intentionally we can be said to do. Accordingly, let me express what I now wish to say in terms of the word ‘do’. Thus, since there exist familiar uses of ‘I can move the piano’, there must exist wholly explicable uses of ‘The movement of that piano was done by me’, and, generally, ‘The movement of extra-bodily objects was done by me.’ (And therefore also readily explicable but wholly stipulative uses of ‘The movement of extra-bodily objects was willed by me.’) Then I shall in the succeeding section (b) describe a simple situation in which it would be natural to put such an expression to one of these unproblematic ordinary uses. My purpose in so doing being, that I want to bring out the clash between such (ordinary) explicated uses of ‘do . . .’ and the metaphysical (undetermined and philosophically motivated) use, on the score of actual extension. Thereby I hope to bring to the light of day the philosophical urge to deny ordinary usage, and not merely to graft onto it addenda without ensuring how or whether they ‘knit’ onto the main body. For in just the situation where a correct speaker of English would be obliged to say that ‘the movement of that extra-bodily object was done by me’, one is simultaneously inclined to say, ‘Really, I did not do that.’ Thus, a new usage, and not just a new set of beliefs, is advanced; and not just a new usage, but one that on the score of extension actually comes into collision with established usage. It follows that the assertion that ‘Really, I did not do that’, whatever its deep underlying rationale, is to be interpreted as making a revolutionary verbal recommendation, as insisting that we put old terms to significantly different uses. Now it is clear that the metaphysical claim that ‘Really, I cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects’, even though it is making a verbal recommendation, is trying at the same time to say something of a disturbing

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and radical nature. We cannot rest content with so banal an interpretation as that it is interested in words alone. It must be seen as making a verbal recommendation in the interests of metaphysical truth. After all, it gives expression to the deep and persuasive theory of the volition. Then in the light of this observation, we may regard what now in (b) immediately follows as an abortive attempt to get the metaphysical use of ‘I can exert my will on objects’ – construed as an extension of‘I can will the movement of eyes, legs, head, . . .’ – into the language. (b) The extensionalist clash with ordinary instrumentalist usage Here is an example of an extensionalist clash between ordinary usage and a usage expressive of metaphysical volitionism. It takes place over a simple instrumental action. Suppose a man is turning the knob of a wireless. We ask him what he is doing, and he says: ‘I am increasing the volume of the wireless.’ And this is a paradigmatic example of instrumental action. Yet someone might insist that all that this man had done was move his fingers – in such a way as to . . . (technical explanation) . . . increase the volume; and add that, no matter whether the volume did or did not increase, he had in each done precisely the same thing: namely, move his fingers in a certain way – and absolutely nothing else! However, ordinary language is at loggerheads with this claim: it contains act-orders like ‘Turn up the volume.’ While there are arm wavings and head turnings, there are also murders and piano movings. But is ordinary language sacrosant? Since it did not invent the items that it designates, it must stand or fall with the truth or falsity of its own classificatory scheme. Nonetheless, so well tried a system undoubtedly has great prestige. And the more elemental and universal its subject-matter, the more it may be presumed to embody truth. It is therefore of real moment that ordinary language is at odds with the claim that (say) ‘We cannot willingly alter the volume of a wireless.’ Yet simply to assert that usage rules against assertions of this kind, is to treat instrumental claims as mere nonsense, whereas I think there is something about instrumental act-situations which at least inclines us to say that we cannot really ask someone to (say) increase the volume of a wireless. Something in the instrumental situation suggests that a strictly accurate rendition of the content of instrumental orders should take a different form: one cast in purely bodily terms. For although we do not need to ask for a translation of those orders, nevertheless some sort of translation could be given. And it would take the form: ‘Carry out bodily act , which brings about φ  , and thereby do  .’ For example: ‘Turn your hand thus, which brings about volume increase, and thereby do

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an act of volume increasing.’ Just how pure this ‘body language’2 could get I do not know, and there are reasons for supposing that such ‘translations’ must become increasingly hard to come by as the act verges upon the knack and the skill, for even though most of these acts are the making of bodily movements, it is not in the case of the skill possible to offer an equivalence to the order that is cast in bodily terms alone, since such an order inevitably involves reference to the desired extra-bodily effect. Thus, there at least exist limits to these ‘translations’ of instrumentalist into non-instrumentalist language. Nevertheless, there is a significant difference in the directions one gives for performing the very same act, on the one hand to an expert, on the other hand to a novice like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, which suggests that two languages might exist, and that one might mirror the facts as the other does not. Thus, the inclination to drop instrumentalist uses, and replace them by a bodily ‘translation’, is greater the more doubt there is as to the certainty of the result. And so we have a series in which one kind of use gives way to the other in our characterisations of the very same act. Thus: (1) I am increasing the volume, (2) I am turning the knob to make the volume greater, (3) I am turning the knob in the hope of increasing the volume, (4) I am turning the knob on the off-chance that it (the movement of the knob) might increase the volume, (5) I am really just turning the knob, i.e. I am really just make-believing the wireless still works, (6) I am really only moving my fingers: this knob is completely jammed, and I know the old wireless doesn’t really work anyway. (This last case might be claimed to be the Act Analogue of Solipsism: the agent here being said to be ‘alone with his body’.3 ) Then since we do the same thing in each case, and since we are more cautious in our choice of words in (6), does not this suggest that it is (6) alone that provides us with a strictly accurate description of what we do in all of (1)–(5)? Well, to the extent that we are wedded to ordinary language, we must demur. Thus, we would none of us say, concerning case (1), that ‘He is really only moving his fingers.’ In the first place the claim is false, and secondly it is what rather we should say of case (6) or of a situation in which someone was hallucinating and labouring under the mistaken impression that his fingers were contacting a wirless knob. No standards 2 3

Cf. the so-called ‘language of sense-data’. In fact he is alone, not merely with his body, but with phantasies of exerting his will on the extrabodily sector of the world, just as any attempt at a language of sense-data will inevitably at various points, exactly analogous to the skill, reveal that it is in the final analysis totally dependent upon the language of material objects. For example, what is the autonomous sense-datum content in ‘I thought I saw a swirling crowd of smiling faces’? That is, how might we describe the same internal facts without recourse to terms drawn from the language of objects?

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of strictness, given an adherence to ordinary language, license such claims. Now the peculiar thing about the utterance, ‘He is really only moving his fingers’, is the word ‘only’. What is it that is being ruled out? What is it that he does not do? A strange and primitive sort of linguistic reaction wells up within one at this stage. What is it that he does not do? ‘Why, he doesn’t do that’, we say, pointing at the movement of the knob that he is moving, ‘He isn’t doing that’, pointing to the moving and glowing insides of the wireless, ‘He isn’t doing the causal connections!’ This is a bizarre and wild outbreak of the philosophical unconscious. 3. why prefer the volitionist novel usage of active terms? (a) Volitionism must take itself to provide a usage more correctly fitting the facts Thus, interiorist volitionism, and its natural extensionalist consequence, the doctrine that unproblematically the will might be extended beyond the body, leads to a head-on collision with established usage on the score of the actual extension of ‘willed event’ (‘event that is done by me’). For these interiorist theories lead one to say: ‘Really I am not moving the knob that I am moving.’ They must therefore suppose that the familiar expression ‘I am moving that knob’ is at best ambiguous between a merely seemingly active causal sense and a properly active sense. So that when I am instrumentally moving a knob the properly active sense of ‘I am moving my fingers’ comes into play, but the properly active sense of ‘I am moving the knob’ does not. And does, only when I am exercising rare powers. In short, these theories deny that there are any instrumental acts. But why? It is because they need to leave linguistic space for the properly active sense of ‘I am moving –’. After all, this expression in this properly active sense is supposedly to swing into operative use only when the hypothetical extension of the will has taken place: that is, when the will manages to reach out from the mind like a psychic antenna immediately activating extrabodily items: a kind of mental force immediately activating its mentally projected though nonetheless physically real external object. The reasoning behind this linguistic reform is this. Interiorist volitionism treats with the utmost seriousness the fact that actions are psychological phenomena, and that it is an essential mark of the mental that it is directed beyond itself. Thus, taking action to be a purely internal mental event, volitionism cannot suppose that action, any more than desire or thought or belief, can have any object other than that which under some description

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is given to the subject. It therefore cannot allow that if moving a limb causes some distinct external event e1, which in turn causes distinct external event e2, . . . , that the single act of moving that limb was co-present with acts of e1-making, e2-making, . . . . It must allow that the act was in a purely causal sense an act that is an e1-maker, a e2-maker, . . . , but not that it was an act that is an act of e1-making, e2-making, . . . . For where else in the mind do we find nested descriptions related in this sequential way? Not with image, thought, sense-impression, emotion, . . . . Thus, volitionism assumes that the psychological event of limb moving can no more fall under both ‘limb moving’ and ‘e1-making’, than an arrow can hit two bull’s-eyes, or a thought of one event can be a thought of an altogether distinct effect-event. It must therefore suppose that finger movement, and not knob movement, is what is actively done in this situation. Therefore ‘moving the knob’ cannot in that instrumental situation be an act-description; for the one and only active mental event that then occurs falls under a description that is directed to a different object, viz. under ‘limb moving’. But it can be an act-description when the will is capable of reaching out beyond the surface of the body and immediately activating the knobs of wirelesses (say). These properties follow upon the assumption that the volition is an event that is on all fours with events like thoughts, images (etc.): that is, a fully interior phenomenon with a distinctive nature of its own. Here we have the rationale behind the volitionist denial of the reality of instrumental actions.4 Now it is not open to us to construe the subject-matter of volitionism as other than actions. That is, we cannot suppose that the claim that ‘We did not actively move the knob’ involves a wholly novel sense for such terms as ‘active’ ‘move’, nor for the sentence as a whole. For this theory is and takes itself to be concerned with a highly familiar phenomenon referentially captured by existent communal linguistic practices. It therefore cannot afford to detach itself wholly from established usage. But ordinary language recognises no more than one active sense to ‘I can move my arm’, even though it distinguishes instrumentalist from non-instrumental uses of this sentence. It follows that, if room is to be allowed for the ‘interesting’ ‘novel’ use of ‘I can will the movement of the knob’, the old or established usage must 4

In fact there are two, and only two, places where the ‘mental arrow’ hits a succession of objects: perceptual noticing, and bodily willing. That is, at the two doorways leading in and out of the mind: the unique input/output sites. As a red circle in a visual field is (at once) red sensation/red light/red setting sun, so an act of the will is (at once) a ‘doing’ of finger movement/trigger movement/rifle report/. . . . The ‘moral’ is, that these psychological events cannot be as like to arrows as are (say) thoughts. Causality determines their extensional objects as not elsewhere in the mind.

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undergo serious reformation, for it comes into head-on collision with the ‘novel’ use: it must shed all of its instrumentalist uses! Thus, volitionism requires of ordinary language that it undergo reformation to this radical degree. And it correlatively requires of mankind generally – who after all fashioned common usage – that it abandon one of its most familiar and everyday beliefs! Now the inherent confusion in this position attests to the force in Wittgenstein’s informal slogan: ‘Ordinary language is all right.’5 (b) Comparing volitionist with scientific linguistic reformation Where ordinary language permits, ‘Arm movement was done by me’, ‘Foot movement was done by me’, ‘The doing of arm movement occurred when arm movement was done by me’, ‘Wireless knob movement was done by me’, the usage corresponding to the volitionist theory accepts the first three of these utterances, deletes the fourth, replaces it by ‘Wireless-knob movement was not then done by me’, and augments usage with ‘Wirelessknob movement might sometime be done by people like mystics who are endowed with special powers.’ Thus, we have here a novel usage, overlapping with ordinary usage, in the same line of business as one might say, supposedly truer to the facts concerning the elemental items that the fallible system of ordinary language has managed successfully to designate. For this metaphysical theory cannot but accept that ordinary language employs expressions like ‘The doing of ’ with designatory purport on just those occasions when certain highly distinctive psychological events take place, and therefore accept that it must be given credit for singling out certain ultimate constituents of The Universe. But in extending the extension of ‘event that is done’ to the phenomena which instrumentally we manipulate, ordinary language is at this point understood to incorporate error, to encapsulate a false theory about the nature of the designatum. At this point ordinary language is said to endorse a false metaphysics. It makes a serious error concerning the ultimate furniture of the universe. By contrast, the novel or reformative usage, like our actual use of words like ‘gold’, ‘animal’, ‘person’, and unlike our use of words like ‘ghost’, ‘ether’, ‘after-life’, ‘demon’, ‘transcendental ego’, is said to have the indispensable virtue of corresponding to reality, and in consequence the additional virtue of internal intelligibility. Postulating the existence of instrumental acts is thereby interpreted as akin to extending the extension of ‘conscious being’ 5

The Blue Book, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, 28.

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from animals as far as ghosts – which is indicative of intension confusion, while postulating the mystic willing of the extra-bodily is taken as akin to extending the extension of ‘gold’ and ‘liquid’ as far as examples like colloidal gold or the liquidity of glass – and this is indicative of intension grasp. Nevertheless, as we noted above, the novel usage must overlap with established usage, for they have a common subject-matter, viz. the willing/the willed/the being-willed-by. For mankind’s language of active terms bears witness to the fact that he has definitely but confusedly apprehended an ultimate piece of ontological furniture. Therefore all that we can do is reform established usage; rather as, under the influence of salient discoveries in the outer reaches of psychological communication, we might some day come to crystallise out or else to reform the indeterminate or else already confused use of terms like ‘telepathy’, ‘extra-sensory perception’. (c) Super science, bad metaphysics, and bedrock usage (1) And so we can see that John Wisdom had discerned something of import when he ironically characterised Bad Metaphysics as ‘Super Science’:6 for this entire disagreement is modelled upon scientific disagreement concerning fundamental items like the electron/the quantum/the quark – items whose existence one might at some point have rationally questioned. (As if there were such a thing as factually tunnelling under the ordinary usages of ‘action’, ‘consciousness’, ‘time’ and bringing them low in nearly total ruin!) The central error in such a line of thought is the failure to grasp one fundamental truth. Namely, that our concern is not with idiosyncratic contingent a posteriori concepts like ‘gold’, ‘tuberculosis’, ‘hippopotamus’; which are concepts we might well have lacked, which are not the distinctive subject-matter of philosophy, and which stand for realities whose real or essential natures are revealed only after centuries of depth empirical inquiry. It is rather with a priori ultimates like ‘consciousness’, ‘person’, ‘belief ’, ‘time’, ‘action’; which, through being indispensable to the processes of thought, given to any fully developed self-conscious consciousness, and amenable to philosophical investigation, have a right to be separated out from the above concepts under such headings as: bedrock concept/a priori concept. (2) To fail to see this, is to imagine that we might treat the existence of Action or Consciousness or the Inner World or Time or even the World 6

‘Metaphysics and Verification’, Mind, 1938, 455, Edinburgh: Nelson.

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itself (!) as scientific issues, and at the very least as amongst mankind’s empirical discoveries. (As was the hippopotamus.) And it is therefore further to assume that ordinary language could in these areas harbour confusions comparable with those it might make concerning the classification of certain animals in the wrong genus or species, e.g. whales as fish, blind worms as snakes. Consider the example of Time. In what sense is the reality of Time an empirical discovery? While animals know nothing of Time, even though they are sensitive to its intervals, the very framework of self-conscious consciousness is avowedly temporal: for example, in its continual concern with the projected future. And that is to say that the existence of self-conscious consciousness internally requires knowledge of the reality of Time. But this can only fully be credited to those who have mastered a language. Therefore an entire conceptual and linguistic framework must mediate the awareness of this single elemental item! Moreover, such an awareness is internal to our very being as self-conscious beings, and therefore internal to our being. Then how could the discovery of Time, or for that matter of Action or Mind, be an empirical achievement?7 For while the facts exist independently of us, we cannot exist as we are in ignorance of those facts! Like a vine on a trellis our minds are moulded by a conceptual edifice that is structured out of Time, Action, Consciousness, Reality . . . So how could we be in error in linking these elemental items with certain fundamental linguistic usages? It seems that when Bad Metaphysics attacks ordinary usage in respect of these ultimates, it reveals its pretensions to being a Super Science, and does so through treating the assumptions underlying ordinary language as likewise Super Scientific in type: something as it were a stratum deeper than Fundamental Particle Theory! What we single out by (say) the word ‘action’ is ultimately revealed through and enshrined in common usage, which encapsulates the discoveries of our remote ancestors. Then a ‘Bad Metaphysics’ of such an a priori-given fundamental avails itself of a concept thus determined in the past, and yet at the same time would reform that groundwork almost to the point of denial! This is a nearly contradictory project! ‘Bad Metaphysics’ is thus in a condition of ‘bad faith’ in regard to language. It tends hubristically to rise above its own origins – for how else is one to single out so fundamental an item as action but through the linguistic machinery created by our ancestors? Purely through the resources of some virgin ‘I’? Purely introspectively? That is, such a theory must suppose that it can 7

And the same must be said of material objects. (Pace Hilary Putnam’s ‘thing theory’.)

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discern these fundamentals independently of its conceptual heritage and its necessary linguistic repository. Rather like Lucifer in relation to the Lord to whom he owes his existence, it seeks to transcend its own foundation! Now it may perhaps be the case that at birth man is not endowed with an innate concept of Time or Action. And it clearly is not the case that these items are empirical discoveries, i.e. discovered through making and interpreting certain observations. Rather is it that man is at birth so endowed as to be soon capable of learning from others a language of temporal or active terms, and that a necessary and sufficient condition of this accomplishment is the possession of the concepts of, and awareness of the reality of, Time and Action. This much can be asserted without assigning temporal precedence to one or the other. In sum, what is innate is the capacity to learn the language and become aware of what it designates, what is experienced is language and the items of the World, and what takes place when these concepts are acquired is the product of the interaction of these two factors. My present concern is the proposed novel reformative usage of the Badly Metaphysical volitionist. This novel usage of active terms, even though it contains the seeds of its own destruction, is something which could be taught. In general it will manifest its departure from ordinary usage when it comes to applying ‘willed event’ (‘event that is done by me’) to phenomena lying beyond the body, as well as to instrumentally manipulated events both within and without the body. While as things stand it will primarily manifest its novelty in the deletion of an entire sector of established usage, viz. its instrumental sector. An instructor in the metaphysical usage would inform us that we should not say ‘I moved the wireless knob’ (when I actively manipulate that event), or ‘I did that’ (of the knob movement), and that we should restrict what we ‘did’ to ‘I moved my hand’, ‘I did that hand movement’, etc. This, according to the theory, correctly mirrors reality. The ordinary language of action is, apparently, far from being ‘all right’! (d) What primal natural facts support the proposed volitionist usage? (1) Thus, extreme (‘Bad Metaphysical’) volitionism counsels us to reform established usage. Now at first blush this whole matter might look like a trifling linguistic problem, the problem of whether or not to follow a verbal recommendation. Are we only to call movings of our bodies actions, and delete from the language all instrumental expressions like ‘kill’, ‘drive’, ‘increase the volume’? And where previously we would say ‘I am increasing the volume’, are we now to substitute sentences like ‘I am moving my fingers in a circular way, which is causing volume increase’? Yet expressing

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the problem in these terms seems to rob the question of all mystery, of all philosophical interest. There must be more to the problem than a mere question of convention! What we want to know is: why do as the volitionist says and restrict ‘action’ to the mere making of bodily movements? (And the occasional ‘mystic willing’.) The best possible reply would be: because truth is reflected in one rather than the other usage. But why suppose Reality to be as the volitionist claims? As yet no argument has been advanced for this theory. Indeed, the discussion has so far consisted in a comparison of usages rather than the advancing of arguments. Now when our concern is with ultimates like consciousness and action (which are irreducible, necessarily given, prescientifically known realities – as opposed to relative accidentalities like argon or ichthyosauruses) this procedure is perhaps acceptable. As we have recently noted, our belief in the reality of consciousness does not rest upon argument, would not exist in the absence of an established usage of psychological terms, and in that sense is non-argumentatively based upon the existence of communal linguistic practices (without which developed self-consciousness would not have arisen). Nevertheless, certain natural facts must non-argumentatively have guided pre-rational mankind in forming these important usages in the dim prehistory of the species at the dawning point of self-consciousness. More exactly: the passage from the pre-rational state to rationality internally involved the formation of such usages and awareness of the realities they designate, and it was at the behest of certain natural facts. (2) Let me explain. While action and perception and consciousness have no tendency to cause any particular physical phenomenon or set of phenomena in any given setting, they nonetheless have a characteristic ‘outer face’ in the following sense. The simpler the organism in which they occur, the more they figure in causal transactions from inner to outer that are readily interpretable to a third-person other. For example, nearby perception by an insect of its natural prey or predator will very often cause movement, and such movement is in that situation readily interpretable. Then I would suggest that such an ‘outer face’, call it physical condition Cφ, must have been the kind of phenomenon through which particular psychological phenomena first came to the consciousness of some third-person other(s). However, it is one thing to know of and notice such psychological phenomena in another through an ‘outer’ phenomenal ‘face’ like Cφ – which is what we expect of animals generally – it is another to relate to them as does a self-conscious consciousness. That is, to be in a position to notice

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and know of them/in oneself and another/under linguistically demarcated concepts. This transcendent development depends upon Cφ – but also on the internal psychological correlate of the outer phenomena, call it Cψ. For example, the phenomenon of physical action  must have been conceptually demarcated via an outer physical condition Cφ which included such situational facts as the presence of a quarry, together with an internal Cψ which included desire. Now these two conditions, Cφ and Cψ, are interdependent; indeed, this Cψ rationalises this Cφ: for why a quarry might figure in Cφ is because it evidences a constitent of Cψ, viz. desire. In short, the development of self-conscious conceptualised knowledge of physical action was made possible by Cφ and Cψ, and ultimately by Cψ. In this sense this psychological event is picked out for the language and its concepts via the external and internal conditions Cφ and Cψ, and ultimately via Cψ. To repeat: even though pre-rational mankind experienced his own acts without recourse to Cφ or Cψ, and knew of and noticed the acts of others via Cφ, action in the first place only came to self-conscious awareness under a concept through the use of Cφ and Cψ, and ultimately through Cψ. Mankind did not argumentatively reason his way to knowledge of the existence of items thus falling under active concepts; but thanks to Cφ and Cψ, and ultimately to Cψ, he was able nonetheless thus to demarcate them. His knowledge of the item rests in this way upon certain primal natural facts. But not in the simple way his knowledge of gold does. The whole process is at once deeper – and darker. For this is how man came to know of the World/Space/Truth/Self/Time/Consciousness: the whole galaxy of Metaphysical Leading Lights; and that is at a considerable remove from his coming to know of roses and blood and squirrels and oranges and heat! In short, certain natural primal facts of inner and outer reality, and ultimately of inner reality, determined the formation of active usages. Now the volitionist is advising reform of the usages thus crystallised out in the remote past of our species. Then what natural facts support a usage of ‘action’ of the kind he recommends? What natural facts support restricting ‘action’ to the mere making of bodily movements? This is what should now be disclosed, for we are at this point comparing and assessing the claims of rival usages. Thus, we here bring together a point of factual substance and a question of language, without falling into the error of degrading the point of substance into one of convention or elevating it into a theme for a Super Science. This is because we are dealing with a ‘bedrock usage’ manifestative of what I have called an ‘a priori concept’

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(such as action or consciousness or space), as opposed to an ‘a posteriori concept’ (such as thorium or ant-eater or meson). That is, questions of the legitimacy of fundamental usage and questions of ultimate (Good) Metaphysical fact coalesce. This is in marked contrast to what we know, from the writings of Putnam and Kripke, concerning the usage of those natural kinds whose essence is disclosed only through depth scientific inquiry. There is a metaphysics of matter, consciousness, life, time, even of animality. There is no metaphysics of cadmium. There is not even a metaphysics of planthood. (3) In section (e) (following) I shall indicate what a valid motive for such a restriction on the extension of ‘action’ might be, and show that no such justification here exists. But as a preliminary point, note that many acts are not bodily actions in the sense (say) increasing the volume of a wireless is bodily. For example, listening to a noise, trying to remember a name, attending to a toothache, are all actions. For we can quote them in reply to ‘What are you doing?’, we can ask someone to stop doing them, we can desire and intend and choose to do them, etc. This is enough to persuade us that they should be classed as actions. Thus, the term ‘action’ applies to more than bodily acts: there is the bodily will and the mental will. Then how are we to justify the proposed restriction of ‘action’ to the making of bodily movements? It is clear from the above that they cannot be the only actions there are. So how could we accept the verbal recommendation in its present form? Must it not at the very least be modified? It may be replied that this argument depends upon a mere convention, upon our present usage of active terms, and fails to engage with the question of substance it sought to answer. For, it may be claimed, there must exist a number of senses of ‘action’ if we can describe processes as unlike as moving pianos and sustaining mental images as actions. Thus, while there are similarities between these phenomena – for it makes sense to ask someone to engage in or cease either procedure – there are yet vast differences – on the score of ontological status and the role played by mechanism, etc. Therefore to classify both arm moving, kicking, walking, as acts; and listening, attending, trying to remember, also as acts; is to unite under one heading two vastly different types of phenomena. Nothing in these phenomena, it might be claimed, forces us so to classify them: in the final analysis, it is a decision on our part to do so. This familiar nominalistic point of view in effect states that there exists no event-type heading, ‘action’, which has univocal application across the mental and physical realms. But what reasons are there for endorsing so great

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a dislocation in our conceptual scheme? I have indicated certain natural facts which support the application of the active sense of ‘do’ across all these phenomena, viz. causal reponsiveness to desire, to decision, to intention. What natural facts militate in the opposite direction? Only one significant difference has been indicated, viz. the apparent ontological unlikeness of (say) kicking and attending. Now while this dissimilarity is a matter of great interest, it can be readily accommodated provided we adjust a too simple theory of the nature of action. Namely, the theory that ‘action’ is the name of a single phenomenal type, as is ‘belief’ and ‘mental image’. For the concept of action is of a special kind. It is such that there is no answer to the question: what is the precise ontological status of actions? For there are mental and physical – actions! This is a complication; and significant. But it is no more than that. And it is not without precedent. Think of the concept of an experience, a concept which ranges across purely internal phenomena like thoughts and essentially physically engaged outward-facing phenomena like the visual noticing of material objects. Even though both of these occurrences are experiences and mental in nature, they are as ontologically dissimilar as are mental and bodily willings.

(e) Diagnostic-pragmatic-organisational considerations supporting the ordinary usage of active terms (1) We detect natural-kinds by discovering relatively tight syndromes of properties, e.g. heavy, golden colour, malleable, ductile, occurring in quartz, chemically unreactive, etc. – for gold. In so doing we diagnostically uncover the presence of a single explanatory source of a vast phenomenal multiplicity, and thereby bring order into disorder. In this sense, questions of identification and of organisational simplification are related considerations in the early stages of the development of a scheme of classification. Think of the factors which conditioned the classification by man of animals like: wolf, fox, dingo, coyote, alsatian, jackal; and of the organisational considerations that must have preceded the uncovering of natural-kinds in general. And so one might superficially justify a particular classification as a natural-kind, in part by appeal to diagnostic considerations, in part by appeal to pragmatic issues of this kind. Then are there any such considerations favouring the adoption of the volitionist usage of active terms? Does it make sense of any array of properties? Does it bring order and simplicity into any concatenation of facts?

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It is natural to assume that if there exists a genuine phenomenal type, action, it too must be the diagnosable-source-of and bringer-of-order-into an array of properties – in despite of the fact that it is an a priori-given concept. Why not? These two theories are by no means inconsistent. Accordingly, I shall now consider a battery of properties which are common to act-situations, and ask whether truth-oriented, or utility-oriented considerations, or both, favour a re-modelling of the classificatory scheme we and all other human speakers have adopted. I have in mind the following traits. Thus: the properties of emanating from a desire, giving expression to an intention, being a possible object of a command, and so of being causally sensitive to the occurrence of an intention-now, of coming as no surprise, being known non-observationally, taking place in select parts of the body, utilising a mechanism; and so on. These form a tightly knit group, strongly suggesting the existence of a common phenomenal something which the word ‘action’ successfully picks out. Further, this group is sufficiently precise in its rules of membership to be incapable of admitting certain dubious entrants. For example, if we so eased the rules as to allow, say, blinking or breathing as actions, much of the precision of the word would be lost. For while I can be asked to blink or try to prevent blinking, I cannot be said to have obeyed or disobeyed when, in the face of such a request, I blink at some stimulus. Again, while I can be asked to hold my breath, I cannot in any typical sense then be asked to ‘resume what you were doing’ (attention, indeed consciousness itself, having little or nothing to do with the breathing process, which is in any case more or less fated). Such phenomena are so untypical of the class we call ‘actions’ that, following upon the decrease in precision, let alone the sheer semantic confusion and indeed error, a great deal of the utility of the word ‘action’ would be lost were they to be accounted actions. These are some of the factors which must have guided our ancestors in coining the term ‘action’ and putting it to certain uses. Then what considerations of this kind exist which might prompt us to scrap expressions like ‘Increase the volume’, ‘Kill’, ‘Start the car’, and replace them by ‘Move your hand . . .’, ‘Contract your index finger . . .’, ‘Swivel your arm . . .’? None come to mind. Then in what way is ordinary usage supposed to have gone wrong in its classifications? I can discover nothing that shows it to be injudicious to allow usage to encompass instrumentalist uses of active expressions. Then are there any superficial pragmatic considerations militating against such a use of active terms? Far from it, it seems. On the contrary, were such a linguistic reform a viable possibility, it would seriously hinder communication. Rather like divers’ boots, this ponderous

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linguistic machinery would slow everything to a near halt. One has only to think of a concrete case: say, the request ‘please drive the car a little more carefully’. (2) Amongst what we call ‘actions’, we make distinctions on innumerable counts: on whether they are intentional, automatic, habitual, physical, mental, absent-minded, noticed, visible, rational, mad, irrational, free, idle, compulsive, skilled, instrumental, ‘basic’, ‘constitutive’, and so on. Then it is not my present purpose to enter into this matter any further than to point out, first the extreme variegation in the items falling under ‘action’; second to indicate certain significant common features present in most or all instances. Above all, to stress the central significance of the intelligibility of ordering an immediate example of the type in question and/or its immediate cessation: that is, to stress the causal efficacy of a present intention. For from a distance this is what stands out. To repeat: the efficacy of the present intention looks to be the feature of prime importance, rather than the property of being instrumental/non-instrumental or physical/nonphysical. Why suppose that the physical bodily act is the only act there is? And yet there is a readily understandable inclination to say that bodily non-instrumental actions are the most fundamental, and indeed the most real, of all actions. This tendency derives from a respectable source. I mean, the fact that all physical instrumental actions are identical with the bodily act of moving (etc.) a limb, and are the instrumental act they are because the bodily action contingently causes the requisite instrumental effect, whereas the reverse is not true. Let me now express this same point more perspicuously. Thus, no physical act-type is necessarily non-instrumental; while some act-types are necessarily instrumental, and necessarily the latter class excludes the class of all bodily act-types. For example, killings are necessarily instrumental, while only a few arm raisings are instrumental. Then there can be no doubt that this property of bodily actions is of considerable importance. Nevertheless, it will not bear the weight placed upon it by volitionists. And so the position is this. The metaphysical volitionist has no quarrel over the existence of any act type. For example, he accepts the existence of the act type, door opening. Where he differs from the rest of humanity is, that he believes the instances of this act type to be phenomenally rare, whereas we all know they are common or garden. What he supposes is, that all actual actions are in all probability bodily actions, and that bodily act-descriptions are never instrumentalist in character, since he believes that all actions are non-instrumental. Thus, he disagrees over the extension of active terms, for he disagrees over their application-conditions,

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and this is because he differs over what they actually are. He persists in thinking of them as on all fours with thoughts – but without looking at the way things are. And that is to say: without having recourse to the conditions which helped form the actual usage of active terms. That is, without a study of the application-conditions observed by ordinary language. (f ) ‘Illumination’ vs. metaphysics Thus, neither truth-oriented nor utility-oriented considerations favour the restriction of ‘action’ to the sub-class of actions that are no more than the making of bodily movements (and its supposed ‘mystic’ extension beyond). Therefore if the claim ‘We cannot will the movement of extrabodily objects’ is understood as the making of a verbal recommendation, profound or shallow, nothing has so far emerged which justifies it. Nevertheless, it might be said, such a linguistic reform would have certain advantages. Thus, it would at least be illuminating. For if we began to speak to experienced engineers in the manner reserved for novices like the Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times – ‘Lay your hand upon this lever . . . close your hand . . . tighten it . . . now try to hit your chin’ in place of ‘Lift this lever’ or ‘Start the dynamos’ or ‘Get the factory on the move’ – we would remark the common feature that all these examples of action begin with bodily movement. But what do we mean by describing this as ‘illuminating’? Simply that we notice this common feature which ‘so often goes unheeded’? But it is obvious, it stares one in the face, and is doubtless a fact of the first importance. Why should we need the drastic measure of radical linguistic reform to drive this message home? There has to be more to it than that. The series of six instrumental cases set out in section 2(b) were intended, not as a mere linguistic observation, but as the basis of a metaphysical argument: they drew attention to a common substratum of bodily movement, in the light of which a metaphysical claim was affirmed, viz. what emerged in what I called ‘the outbreak of the philosophical unconscious’. When we point to the moving knob we are there and then moving, and say ‘I do not move that’, this is not making a verbal recommendation simply in order to underline the significant common feature of bodily movement. The point is not really verbal. Yet it is making a verbal recommendation; except that the incentives behind such a recommendation are extremely complicated, indeed are as complicated as the concept of a physical action, and we are not yet aware of them. The analysis of that ‘outbreak of the philosophical unconscious’ is the same process as bringing those incentives to light. Once that outbreak

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is fully analysed, we shall then find ourselves in a position to use the once metaphysical ‘I cannot move the knob of the wireless’ non-metaphysically. Analysing such a metaphysical utterance is the very complicated process of giving it a use. This is the task of the remainder of Part I. 4. a summary of the state of pl ay (1) Let me now give a brief review of what has emerged in the discussion in this and the previous chapter concerning the question: can the will be extended beyond the body? What in the pejorative sense I am calling a ‘metaphysical’ use of an expression, is so not in virtue of the fact that an error is thereby committed either in the rules of use we observe or the extension we affirm. After all, mere linguistic error is of no intrinsic interest, whereas the metaphysical use of an expression is philosophically motivated. And neither is it that the rules of use and the extension are indeterminate. For vagueness has no close link with the ultimate nature of things. Then why call certain uses of language ‘metaphysical’? This question was raised earlier, where the following explanation was given. The received understanding of the term ‘metaphysics’ is, that it is a non-physical theorising about the nature of the items singled out by what I have called ‘a priori concepts’ (such as Time, Mind, Will) as opposed to ‘a posteriori concepts’ (like Light, Tickle, Cloud): an activity which necessitates an at least unsystematic awareness of the reality of the item whose nature we probe in our metaphysical speculations. Then I deem a use of a word (pejoratively) ‘metaphysical’ if the word is so used as to give expression to a ‘bad’ metaphysical theory of the nature of the item picked out by some a priori concept: that is, a theory which suffers from the flaw of being based upon a priori considerations when it should instead be determined by the facts which originally led mankind to frame those fundamental concepts – a flaw which is tantamount to having pretensions to being a ‘Super Science’ (mistaking its office, so to say). Then in the case of the will, a certain extreme variety of volitionism is such a theory; and there exist corresponding metaphysical uses of ‘act’, ‘will’, ‘do’. Meanwhile, an example of that metaphysical use is, ‘I do not do that’, where we indicate the movement of the object we are engaged in moving. The theory we have been considering which determines the metaphysical claim that ‘we might will extra-bodily events’, posits the occurrence of an interior willing event which immediately generates the willed event. And this is an extreme version of volitionism. Just how extreme depends upon one’s reading of the word ‘immediate’. Then at this point I must settle

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upon a sense for the word. Now one possible model of immediate power is magnetic action at a distance. However, an even more radical model is provided by an immediately given singular mental-causal relation: say, the causing by one’s present decision of one’s present willing. This is the sense which I assume in what follows. Given such a strong sense of ‘immediate’, we arrive at what is perhaps the most extreme metaphysical volitionism. (2) I earlier noted, in considering the Putnam/Kripke account of naturalkind terms, the error of assuming that the extension of any term must be wholly determined by the constitutive elements of a concept present in the speaker’s mind. Then the above volitionist theory commits precisely this error. It supposes the extension of these terms to be completely determined by the constituent elements of a metaphysical-theoretic concept of physical action, supposedly all openly present in the mind of any speaker agent. That such a theoretical position is adopted, is consistent with the fact that this extreme volitionism construes physical actions as mental events which stand in the above immediate quasi-magical relation to their event objects. It finds, so to say, the philosophy of language that suits its own idealistoriented outlook. Then it follows that this theory must suppose that the mind is immediately aware of all the extension-determining elements of the item the act-term purports to designate (as it is in the case of a thought and its object). It must therefore suppose that it is immediately given to an agent that an act of a certain kind has occurred when it has. Likewise, it should be immediately given whether that essentially directed psychological event – conceived of as the expression of an almost magically potent longing – can be directed onto a novel type of item such as an extra-bodily entity. Thus, the supposition that we might will the movement of extra-bodily objects, the extreme metaphysical volitionism under consideration, and the belief that the extension of ‘act’, ‘will’, ‘do’ is wholly determined by the concept in the mind of the speaker agent – coalesce at this point. (3) Volitionism can take sober or extreme form. My interest at this point in the discussion is in the extreme end of the spectrum. Then let me spell out more precisely that most radical version of volitionism. It runs as follows. Bodily acts are events of the inner life; they occur in the mind and not in the space occupied by the willed event; they are the immediate cause at a distance of whatever one wills or does; the variety of immediacy is total and quasi-magical; and they are essentially putative directed event-causes of their event-object. This theory does justice to four noteworthy features of bodily action: (1) its psychological character; (2) the absence of instrumental

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means in generating limb movement; (3) the seemingly internally given experience of causation when acting; and (4) the necessary existence of a goal. Then nothing in such an internalist theory suggests that it might be problematic whether or not what is ‘done’ could lie beyond the body. On the contrary, it is precisely such an extreme volitionism that determines such metaphysical uses of ‘will’ as: ‘Some day we might extend the range of operation of the will beyond the body’ and ‘I do not will the movement of the knob that I am turning.’ They seem as natural as: ‘Some day we might see in the dark’ and ‘I do not visually perceive all of the effects of the phenomenon that I am here and now visually perceiving.’ (4) This metaphysical theory is the origin of the metaphysical utterance that is my present concern, viz. ‘We cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects.’ Yet earlier, at the beginning of chapter 2, I claimed that, although this metaphysical utterance was based on a false account of the rules of use of the terms involved, nevertheless the sentence put to such use may or may not express a truth or falsehood. That is, even though almost anyone’s claim that ‘I cannot immediately will the movement of this table’ will be an example of ‘bad metaphysics’, yet it may be true that we cannot immediately will the movement of tables, and true therefore that this sentence can be used non-metaphysically. Then how are we to discover whether the line of extension of ‘willed event’ must snap as we attempt to lead it beyond the body? Earlier I made the suggestion, which I simply here repeat, that this cannot be determined unreflectively. For it cannot, as it can when we are concerned with events on the body’s surface such as ear movement, be determined simply through trying. Something more, namely reflection, is needed, if we are to answer the question. We know that this reflection must be philosophical reflection. It consists in a philosophical analysis of the concept of physical action. This might seem to run counter to the Putnam/Kripke account which I endorse. And in a sense it does, for my concern is to dismantle an a priori-given concept present in the minds of speakers of the language. And whereas there is a philosophical analysis of the concept of a physical action, there cannot be a philosophical analysis of the purely a posteriori idiosyncratic concepts of (say) gold or tiger. Yet the divergence in the nature of the enterprises is by no means total, for they are from the point of view of the word’s extension at one. For the philosophical analysis, from that point of view, does no more than indicate certain a priori-given constraints upon the extension of ‘immediately willed event’. It leaves the final element in the determination of that extension up to science, and this last is precisely the position with

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‘gold’ and ‘tiger’. For the truth is, that I hope both to analyse the concept of physical action and determine whether the extensional thread of ‘event that is immediately willed’ snaps beyond the body surface, and my approach is such that these are inter-dependent inquiries. That is, I recognise that my goal of determining whether the thread snaps can be reached only through analysing the concept, and yet I will attempt to perform the latter task through attempting to perform the former. Then let us begin this much-postponed process of ‘philosophical reflection’. And I will start with a first simple sketch of a supposed extension of the will beyond the body, a sketch entirely conditioned by the extreme theory of the volition under investigation. This is so to speak the worst and first approximation to a correct theory of physical action. It will come under attack, as will each subsequent example and the theory it expresses. In this way I hope to apprise us of the elements of the correct theory; which is to say, the elements of the concept of physical action. So I shall be feeling my way towards both the formulation of the concept of physical action and the possible extension of the extension – if it exists. And the trail leads through the detailed features of both the phenomenon and concept of physical action. 5. building up the concept of a physical act ion (1): the knowledge factor (a) (a) The rationale of the ensuing descriptive procedure When someone points at the moving knob which is moving because we are turning it and says: ‘You are not doing that’, and adds ‘But you are moving your fingers’, we cannot see this as the explanation of the use of ‘I am doing –’ which he has in mind – unless it is simply to mean that ‘you are only allowed to say that you move parts of your body’ – which is an uninteresting and lifeless thing to say (a mere stipulative re-description of the way things are). Yet he says ‘You are not doing that’ with intensity, with an air of insight. Now we have already discussed this puzzling explanation of the metaphysical use, and have so far found it inadequate. But suppose he were to abandon the attempt to demonstrate what ‘really moving that knob’ would be like by the simple act of moving his own fingers, and adopted an altogether different method. Suppose he employed the method of example: imaginatively constructing a series of examples of the active moving of objects, each example edging that much closer to the required goal, culminating in a case he would describe as ‘a true immediate

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willing of the extra-bodily’. More, towards a properly explicated use of this expression, a use therefore of which we could all legitimately avail ourselves. In this way we would manage to set out a series of possible uses of ‘exerting one’s will on an extra-bodily object’, the final use being the one that we seek. Alternatively, we will have described a series of possible applications of a picture that is embedded in our minds – a picture in which an active subject stands in physical proximity to a moving object – whose application has not been given: an image which succeeds in dominating our thinking simply because we have not bothered to question its application, to ask so to speak for its credentials. This creates the illusion of a God-given application, i.e. of a metaphysical fact. I shall try to add to these cases, as we progress, feature after feature of the act of moving a limb, the aim being to get as close as possible to describing a case of the exertion of the will upon an extra-bodily object which is at the same time identical in all other respects with an example of its exertion upon parts of the body. This process will reveal the complexity of a physical action, which we are liable to underestimate, and constitutes the process of building up the concept of a physical action. Dissolving the puzzle, ‘Why cannot I exert my will on an extra-bodily object?’, consists in bringing these two sets of descriptions – the cases of the exertion of the will upon limbs and those of the exertion of the will on extra-bodily objects – so close to each other that we are at last freed of the anxiety that a certain mysterious metaphysical case lurks in between: an illusory case whose description cannot be said: what we have been trying to say all along: the case pictured by the picture whose application has never been given. Setting out the full philosophical description, the full analysis, is in a way analogous to the creation of a logically perfect language: it is only then that we cannot try to say what cannot be said. It follows that the use we shall in the end have found for ‘exerting my will upon extra-bodily items as I do upon my body’, will in a sense be disappointingly down to earth and everyday (a sort of swindle). For no concept is as mysterious as a metaphysical concept. (b) Descriptive approximations to ‘an immediate willing of extra-bodily phenomena’ (1) I have already mentioned one possible use of ‘exerting the will on an extra-bodily object’. This is the use that applies when we employ a physical technical means to generate some desired physical effect: say, when we increase the volume of a wireless by manipulating a knob. I shall commence

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the descriptive procedure – in which we endeavour to insert the properties of basic actions into examples of remote control – by setting out a case which omits this feature: that is, the employment of a physical technical means; for the absence of this feature is a significant element of basic actions. Thus, when I actively move a limb, there is no physical deed which I do which is the cause of that limb movement. It is perhaps this property which inclines us to say of a physical action: ‘Amazingly enough, the arm seems to know what is in the mind, what the mind expects of it.’ Or even: ‘How can so mental and insubstantial a thing as an intention make itself felt in so solid a structure as an arm?’ Then as a result of introducing this element of basic physical action into the succeeding examples, we will in those examples encounter similar puzzles to the above, only posed now in literal form. Further, we find in these examples a natural extension of the extreme version of volitionism that is my present topic: the theory that the physical action is the performing of a directed internal ‘doing’ that immediately, inexplicably, and so to say ultimately, causes the desired bodily phenomenon. (2) Here is the first example. (α) The world might have been such that the following obtained. It might have been that whenever a certain man were to say ‘Move’, verbally picking out any object within a few feet of him, that the object moved. Alternatively, it might have been that, instead of needing to say ‘Move’ out aloud, he had only to say it under his breath or else merely to imagine it moving for it to move. Any of these strange situations would suffice for my present purposes, but I shall for the moment consider the first and simplest case. Then no doubt such a state of affairs would greatly astonish this person. And yet after a time he may grow accustomed to it; and would, one assumes, come in the end to expect nearby objects to do as they are told. What is more, he could provide some sort of justification for his expectation: he could quote the relevant statistics on the matter. In sum: he expects those selected objects to do as he desires, and does so because of an experienced correlation. He is no longer surprised that objects do as he wants – and neither are we surprised that our legs move when we walk! But it does not follow that they are the same kind of absence of surprise. This concrete extrapolation of the extremist volitionist theory plainly does not capture all of the essential elements of an exertion of the will upon our limbs, and while it rates as a possible use for ‘exerting the will beyond the body’, it cannot be taken to be an example of ‘exerting the will upon extra-bodily items in the way it is exerted on the body’. Too few of the features of normal physical

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action are present. Thus, while a matching of intent and desire with desired effect obtains, together with an apparent causal immediacy and an absence of surprise at the occurrence of the desired effect, the kind of that absence of surprise is different from that of action, for it is founded upon systematic observation. Therefore this particular feature of the situation, namely the type of the absence of surprise, must be adjusted if we are to make this example approximate more closely to the physical act. (3) Then let the situation be as follows. (β) Suppose the world were such that a certain man found himself in a position to make the following claim: ‘Whenever I say “Move!” to a nearby object, then from that moment on I know the object will move.’ We shall further suppose that, prior to calling out ‘Move!’ to that object, he cannot but assume that it will probably move when he speaks to it, for he is aware of the fact that it has been that way in the past; indeed, presumably he could in the end come by such means to know that it will move. But the moment he actually says ‘Move!’, then he knows it will move. This seems to be a describable case. And yet there is something a little odd in predicting that you will know a specified item of knowledge at a future date. For example, it would be absurd to say, ‘Tomorrow I will know that this object is composed of copper’, and add, ‘I will know because by then I will have carried out the tests which establish that it is.’ Apparently there is no need to carry out the tests! Now I do not think that assuming or suspecting or even knowing that if you tell an object to move you will then know it is going to move, leads to this absurdity. The example seems to be unaffected by the above difficulty, seeing that the knowledge in question had other sources. After all, this man knew the object would move prior to discovering that speech and movement correlated. And neither is there anything untoward in predicting in oneself, not merely an example of knowledge, but that such knowledge will dawn upon one regularly under certain conditions. For think of this case. If you ask me now where a certain painting is situated in the National Gallery, I cannot say. But when I am in the gallery, after I have walked through a certain few rooms, I generally then know where it is. And so, quite innocently, I here predict, under regular circumstances, the impending occurrence of a certain relatively determinate piece of knowledge. All I am unable to do is, make the object of my prediction wholly determinate. The statement, ‘Whenever I say “Move!” to a nearby object, then I know it will move’, is weird. And yet at the same time it resembles a very ordinary

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and familiar case: the case of a physical action; for we have at this point inserted into the earliest and most primitive model of physical action an important and familiar missing element, viz. the knowledge of the future that characteristically follows upon any firm decision to there and then execute an intention. For consider. I am at a political meeting and about to raise my arm as a signal of assent to a motion; and if someone asked me what I was going to do I would say, ‘Raise my arm’. And if someone of a theoretical turn of mind were to ask me whether I actually knew, or perhaps instead merely surmised, that this act was about to occur, I would normally insist that I knew. For do not most people know what they are going to do when they decide to act? Do not (say) car drivers know they are going to accelerate when they decide there and then to accelerate? Knowledge typically obtains in these familiar circumstances. This is the first feature to be noted. The second feature is, the character of its origin. For suppose I am asked how I know I will raise my arm. What do I say? At first I treat this as an absurd question. But suppose I am repeatedly asked. Then eventually it would be natural to say: ‘Look, I just know!’ For while this knowledge is so to say fallible knowledge, inasmuch as the motor-apparatus can let us down, the knowledge that intentional action is about to occur is immediate. The empirically grounded knowledge that an act of a certain kind can occur explains that the intended act falls under a certain description, but it does not explain the knowledge that action is about to occur. And while I know I intend to act, this knowledge is not the evidential basis of my knowledge of impending action. To repeat: my knowledge of the impending act is immediate. This is the second significant feature of physical action which must be considered. I insert it at this point into the next example. (4) (γ ) Whenever the agent says ‘Move!’ to a nearby object, he knows it will move. We ask him to do this, and he does, and says ‘I know it will move in a moment.’ We ask, ‘How do you know?’, and he says, ‘I just do know, that’s all.’ And here we insert into the description of the situation, not merely knowledge that supervenes upon the occurrence of an internal event over which one has jurisdiction, but knowledge that is immediate. This amounts to a significant further advance towards the simultaneous constituting of the physical action and the reflective and philosophically informed construction of an extra-bodily instance of an item’s falling within the extension of ‘willed event’. Why should we not disregard this man’s claims? They are, after all, fantastic. Well, we would certainly disregard what he said if the objects around

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him failed to move on command. If, on the other hand, they invariably behaved as he said, we would presumably be prepared to accept his assurances that they will move when told to move. Nevertheless, while we base our belief upon this regularity, he does not base his assurances upon what functions as the basis of our faith in his assurances. Is there anything amiss in that? Must we regard as linguistically improper the invariably correct though unsupported claim by some blind man that ‘there is some large object in front of me’? I cannot imagine what the grounds of this rejection would be. Whether or not it is rational of this blind man, it can hardly be irrational of him to have such apparently truth-sensitive convictions. I do not claim that these instances of knowledge are inexplicable, although I suggest that a person who makes such a claim to knowledge need not even feel that there is some elusive source of his knowledge which lies tantalisingly just beyond his reach. That is, such a person need not in any way respond to the plea: ‘But surely something tells you!’ In this sense his knowledge, while no doubt explicable, is nonetheless immediate. (5) The series of cases I have described provide us with a series of different ways of using ‘Exerting the will upon extra-bodily objects’. I have been attempting to introduce into an example of remote control – remote control reminds us in a certain respect of physical action – the absence of surprise that characterises an intended action, and if possible the type of absence of surprise: that is, both the obtaining of a state of knowledge, and the particular use of ‘know’ that applies to intentional physical actions. In short, I have been engaged in the process of piecemeal constituting the physical act and conceivably extending the extension of ‘willed event’ beyond the body. Then compare with the bizarre properties of the above examples the following similar set of properties in a humdrum example of physical action. (1) If I want to move my arm and decide to do so then my arm moves, and I employ no means to get this to happen. Further, (2) if I actually reach a firm decision to there and then raise my arm, then generally at that precise instant I come to know that I am going to raise my arm. And (3) the knowledge of impending action is not to be explained through appeal to evidential considerations. Moreover (4) when I move my arm it comes as no surprise to me that my arm moves. And finally (5) the absence of surprise at the occurrence of activeness is likewise not to be explained through appeal to evidential considerations. These characteristics are part of the concept of a physical action. That is, our a priori-given concept of a physical action is of a something of which these are necessarily true.

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6 . buildin g up the concept of a physical act ion (2): the knowled ge factor (b) (a) Do these examples do justice to the kind of knowledge we have of our own physical actions? How closely do we approach to the case of physical action in this last case (γ ) in which a man who speaks to an object ‘just knows’ it will move? To answer this question, we must now ask how this last use of ‘I just know’ compares with its use in the case of intentional physical action. One might at first attempt to distinguish these two uses of ‘I just know’ on the following grounds. One might wish to say that ‘I just know that nearby object will move’ contrasts with ‘I know it will move because I know that someone is next door operating a powerful electro-magnet’, whereas ‘I just know I will raise my arm’ contrasts with ‘I have not yet decided to do so’ and not with ‘This is how I know what I will do.’ That is, one might attempt to distinguish these situations and uses by showing that in intentional action the concept of a way of knowing lacks application but finds application in Case (γ ). But at this point we must guard against confusion. Thus, if we were confronted with the case of a person who had only to say ‘Move!’ to a nearby object for it to move, it would be reasonable to search for concealed apparatus. And this makes it seem that the phenomenon of remote control under discussion is not after all so very remarkable. It makes it seem one phenomenon amongst others. But I think this is a misconstruction of the situation described in (γ ). The genuine and radical oddity of that situation only makes its presence fully felt when the verbally delineated objects continue to do what they are told more or less no matter what the conditions. The whole character of the situation alters at this stage. In the beginning it presents the sort of challenge we meet in a conjurer’s illusion; in the end it would be an understatement to say that ‘we are still ignorant as to the explanation of this phenomenon’. What began by looking like a mere oddity, finishes by revealing itself as an ultimate novelty in the order of things. Explanation eventually lapses. It follows from this that the correct contrast with ‘I just know the object will move’ is ‘I did not know whether it would move the last time I said “Move!”’, rather than ‘I know it will move because someone is next door with an electromagnet.’ In short: while we have a use for ‘I know’ in this situation, we have no properly developed use for ‘I know in this way.’ Therefore the use of ‘I just know’ cannot be distinguished from its use in

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the active situation on the following supposed grounds: namely, that ‘I just know’ is in this special situation to be opposed to ‘I know in this way’, whereas in the active situation it has a different contrast. Nevertheless, I am convinced that they are distinguishable, although on a different count from their contrasts – as I shall try to bring out in what follows. But first, let us get a little clearer on the particular use of ‘I just know’ that is encountered in the bizarre example (γ ). (b) Distinguishing the intuitive from the occult use of ‘I just know’ In the (γ ) situation there are two phenomena we may wish to explain. Why do objects do as this person says? And how does he know they will? The latter question is strange, but not hopelessly so; for it seeks an explanation of someone’s knowing something when he has not the least idea how he knows such a thing. Now there is nothing seriously objectionable in that, and comparable cases can be readily imagined. For example: suppose I can tell you the location of that painting in the National Gallery only when the lighting is good. The next time I locate the painting I am asked whether I can confirm the hypothesis that the lighting figures in the explanation of my success. I need not be able to. And if I can, I need not be able to say what it is about the lighting that is significant. Yet the correlation may persist and predictions be made using it as a ground. Thus, bright lighting, for whatever reason, seems to cause knowledge in me; and that has some explanatory force. Then have we an explanation of my success in locating the painting? We have a rough guide to it, and that is all. Much more is needed. And yet it is in principle accessible. Then have we analogously a rough preliminary guide to the explanation of a person’s knowing that objects will move, when that movement is uniformly preceded by his saying ‘Move!’ to the objects? I think not. For it seems to me that if verbally delineated objects invariably continued to move when told to move, we will eventually reach a stage when all talk of explanation, both of the movement itself and of the knowledge, comes to an end. (If a conjurer were to predict correctly that a table would ‘disappear’, we would look for concealed mirrors; but for what would we look if a man could repeatedly predict the future down to the last detail?) Then if this is how things stand, the use of ‘I just know’ in the bizarre situation (γ ) emerges as highly idiosyncratic and as sharply to be contrasted with its use in connection with locating the painting. For in the bizarre case ‘This is the way I know’ must have a peculiarly limited application; for all that it could mean would be that whenever I have said ‘Move!’ to a nearby object it

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moves, or that shortly before it moves it always gives a preliminary wobble, or something of that sort; but nothing that actually explains the correlation between saying ‘Move!’ and the existence of my knowledge. By contrast, finding out how I know where the painting is located, would consist in providing an explanation of the correlation. For example: on sunny days the light illuminates a certain pillar, and years ago I looked at the painting from that position, so that somewhere at the back of my mind a memory must be lodged that . . . Thus, we have a use for ‘I know in this way’ in the situation in which I become aware of the painting’s whereabouts, and discovering how one knows is here discovering the explanation of that knowledge. But in the extreme case (γ ) under consideration we have no use for ‘I know in this way’, and a fortiori there can be no discovering how one knows that is the discovering of the explanation of that knowledge. Therefore while we employ ‘I just know’ in both of these situations – for I ‘just knew’ that the painting was around the corner and ‘just knew’ that the chair would move – the use of ‘I just know’ must be markedly different on each occasion. One use is what we might call ‘the intuitive use’, the other ‘the occult use’. One ‘just knowing’ might mutate or crystallise into a ‘knowing this way’: this intuition might flower into a fully self-conscious knowing: it might come to itself through recollective insight, and thereby provide an explanation. The other and occult ‘just knowing’ differs from intuition in two significant ways: it cannot mutate into a self-conscious ‘knowing in this way’; and it defies explanation. Thus, an intelligible source of occult ‘just knowing’ is neither to be found ‘on the tip of one’s tongue’, as may well happen with intuitive matters, nor anywhere else. We shall now see that some but not all of the differences listed above separate off occult ‘just knowing’ from the ‘just knowing’ that applies in the case of intentional physical action. (c) The divergence on the score of knowledge between physical action and remote control Let us return to the attempt to relate these several examples to physical action. In particular, to the attempt to distinguish the occult use of ‘just know’ from the use of ‘just know’ in connection with the expression of an intention. In short, let us now address ourselves to the question: how does ‘I just know that nearby object will move’ compare with ‘I just know my arm will move’? If I know that I firmly intend doing act , that knowledge must cause the belief that  will occur. Then what are my reasons for holding that

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belief ? Because I cannot firmly intend  without believing  will occur, it cannot be that my judgement is converted to that belief through knowing of my intention. Rather is it a helpless matter of an entailment to that effect. Thus, the intention causes the belief without doing so by providing grounds for the belief, exactly as does my being conscious immediately and non-evidentially cause my present knowledge that I now exist. In this sense the belief in intended  is a ‘just believing’, as likewise is the knowledge of intended  a ‘just knowing’ – in spite of partially depending upon the empirically founded knowlege that the limb in question is in working order. So this is how we arrive at the view that a man ‘just knows’ he will perform a firmly intended here-and-now bodily act. Then can we distinguish this use of ‘just know’ from the occult use? We cannot distinguish them on the first of the two grounds which separated the intuitive from the occult use: namely, that in the former but not the latter case there exists a hidden source to one’s knowledge that always in principle might ‘crystallise’ into awareness as ‘how I know’, for there is nothing intuitive about knowledge of firmly intended here-and-now bodily acts. But we can distinguish them on the second of the two grounds that marked off intuitive from occult uses: namely, on the score of explicability. Even though both examples of knowledge are irremediably immediate, one is explicable and the other not. Thus, my knowledge that intended arm rise will occur is entirely explicable, being the pellucid product of knowing of my intending and my knowing that my motor-system is in working order and that I can physically act, whereas by contrast there can be no explanation of an occult knowing. This suffices to separate out the two uses of ‘just know’. One knowing is transparent, the other is an impenetrable mystery. Let us express this schematically. We may distinguish (i) knowing overtly in a way (e.g. of the murder by seeing), from (ii) knowing covertly in a way (‘intuitive knowing’, e.g. that Mr X and Miss Y will ‘fall for each other’); and amongst the knowings in no way we can distinguish (iii) explicable opaque knowlege (e.g. of a sensation’s position), from (iv) explicable transparent (e.g. of one’s present existence), from (v) inexplicable opaque (occult knowings). Now the ‘just knowing’ of present firm intentions falls into group (iv), while that of Example (γ ) goes into (v). Then it follows that on this specific count the most plausible and extreme example (γ ) of a putative instance of ‘an immediately willed extra-bodily event’ must fall short of its goal. That is, we have on this count as yet failed to extend the extension of ‘willed event’ beyond the body. And it is a reminder of the cloud on the horizon – mechanism – which looms so large in the next chapter. For it was in part through the factor of mechanism that the knowledge of intended

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arm raising was explicable. Conversely, it was through the absence of a factor comparable to mechanism that the occult knowledge that some nearby object will move when one says ‘Move!’ proved inexplicable, and it was therefore through the absence of such a factor that the movement of that arm fell outside the extension of ‘willed event’. In effect, Cases (α)–(γ ) pay a price for their flirtation with magic. (d) The unlikeness of physical action and remote control on the score of internal prompting Now important as are the above considerations concerning knowledge, it seems nonetheless to me that Examples (α)–(γ ) diverge from the normal physical act situation in a further even more striking respect. In other words, it seems to me that we have so far failed to frame a description of a case of remote control that will strictly parallel an instance of here-and-now intentional action – not merely on account of divergences in the uses of ‘I just know’ – but for an even more important reason. Namely: in all these cases I have had to say ‘Move!’ to the object if I am to get it to move, whereas if I intend to carry out some action and then do so, there is no act that needs immediately to precede either that action or that movement of mine for it to be the carrying out of my intention or a movement that I have done. It is above all in this respect that the comparison with remote control is misguided. Yet this series of examples of remote control comes in many ways extremely close to the case of intentional physical action, and approaches even closer when we complete it with the final members of this part of the series. Those examples take the following form. (δ) Suppose that a person were to find himself in a position to say: ‘I just know that if in my mind I were to address the word “Move!” to any nearby object then it would there and then move.’ Or (ε): ‘It is always the case that whenever in my mind I address the word “Move!” to a nearby object then I “just know” that it will there and then move.’ These cases are strikingly similar to – and yet still distinguishable from – the case of intentional physical action. It almost looks as if this man can in either case decide that a nearby object will move in the way we decide that our finger shall move – and yet the situations are held firmly apart by the same two facts as were noted above. First, by the divergences in the uses of ‘know’; second, by the aforementioned fact that whereas we here bring about a desired effect by performing an internal act from which it is altogether distinct, we do no such thing in the case of intentional physical action.

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While these (α)–( ) cases of remote control differ from physical action on the score of the use of ‘know’ that characterises them, they differ first and foremost in the respect just mentioned. Namely, in needing a distinct actmeans to trigger a distinct and removed effect. Now these situations were constructed in an attempt to assemble a case which we might feel prepared to describe as ‘an extension of the will from the body surface onto an extrabodily object’. So far, adopting the method of example, I have edged my way towards that conjectural case from a specific direction, viz. by examining examples of the moving of extra-bodily objects. But at this point I intend to reverse the direction of approach. I shall begin with a physical action and gradually introduce into its make-up as many elements drawn from the extra-bodily domain as it can accommodate. This will enable me to eschew the difficulty of needing a distinct act to trigger a distinct effect, since the examples with which I shall be concerned will at least ostensibly be free of this contaminating trait. Actively, they seem immediate. There does not seem to be anything unintelligible about the following situation. (ζ ) One day I am writing at the table and I can see only a small part of my arm out of the corner of my eye, say up to an inch above the wrist. Now you would not believe me if I said so, but at least you would know what you were denying, if I were to tell you that when I looked around I saw that the section of my arm between shoulder and wrist had vanished, and that my hand was suspended in mid-air! It is not that there was anything strange about the way it felt: it felt exactly as if my elbow was resting on a cold, hard, table, and, even though I could see no elbow, I could manage to point to the place where elbow and table seemed to meet. For I could imagine thinking I had pointed to my elbow, then looking around and discovering that my left forefinger was pointing at a position on the table, and that my elbow was not there! And I could repeat this performance. I might then start writing with the hand. Suppose that, as I wrote, physiologists found that precisely those changes that normally occur in brain, spinal cord, hand, and shoulder, were now occurring in me and my hand. I think we would in such a case agree that I was in full control of that hand. Then is this the exertion of the will beyond the body? But how could it be? After all, the severed hand must still be accounted part of the body!

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(b) The relation between feeling and power One important factor which influences the way we describe cases of this kind, or for that matter any example of the movement of a limb, is the question of whether or not we have feeling in that limb. Thus, if someone’s arm is brought to such a state that he has absolutely no feeling in it – if it is impossible for him to experience pain or heat or cold, sensations of contact, muscular sensations, and so forth, even in the mildest degree – then would it not be baffling if he were to pick up a pen and write a letter using this arm? It would be strange if he knew anything at all about the posture of the limb, such as whether or not the forearm was flexed. It would be strange in the extreme if he could provide a detailed account of the way the fingers of his hand are lying. (It could not be because he can feel that they are lying in that way.) Of course, he might somehow or other ‘just know’ these things – but that would be a far remove from the ordinary aesthetic situation. If he could feel absolutely nothing in his arm, one would assume that his arm could be amputated without his being any the wiser, and therefore, presumably, that it could be moved through space without his knowing. So surely if this anaesthetised arm moved in a certain way, we would not expect him to be aware of that movement. So how could we expect him to bring about a slow, protracted, deliberate movement, in an arm in such a state? One would not expect him to be aware of movement of any kind in that arm, whether it be active, passive, or reflex. But must we not be immediately aware of any complex intentional movement we immediately effect? Then does not this impose an important constraint upon the construction of cases of remote control? Must not feeling somehow be introduced into the putative immediate object of the will? Is not physical action absolutely dependent upon feeling? Thus, a certain man cannot move his arm simply because it is devoid of all feeling. But why? Is it because of ignorance of its position? I do not think so, for perhaps he can see his arm. Then is it because any knowledge that he has is verbally articulable without being concrete in character? I doubt it. For he has only to look at his arm to acquire knowledge that is cast in ostensible visible form, and yet such concretely given knowledge would in no way overcome his incapacity to act. For the truth of the matter is, that he would not know where to begin if he were then asked (say) to move his index finger. Even if he looked at his arm and stared hard at that finger, his troubles would persist: for he is lacking in respect of some essential internal something: indeed, it is almost as if he lacked some form of inner conviction: as if he had not the heart to move his finger. He does not so

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to speak really know where in space to reach out to if he is to bring about a certain movement somewhere in space. And yet he does really know: he is looking directly at his index finger. Then somehow it seems remote or cut off, as if there were some other form of space in which the finger was not to be found, or as if there were some internal way of gaining access to that finger which is barred to him. He would like to sidle his way down his arm and into his hand; but there is no path leading from him to his hand, nor could there be. In sum, it is clear that mere knowledge cannot bridge the vital gap separating him from active power, irrespective of whether it is concretely acquired. And neither can mere feeling do so, and irrespective of whether it is accompanied by such knowledge. What seems to be needed is a feeling-based immediate awareness of both limb and its position. In their absence, action is impossible. I cannot afford to enter into this in detail here.8 I wish to claim that the fact that our limbs are sensitive is causally connected with our ability to move them. Now this is a characterisation of physical actions as we know them. Certainly, we can describe bizarre cases which are at variance with this – but what does that demonstrate? After all, we can describe bizarre cases in which a person can report on the taste of a particular substance after having it brought into contact with his tongue, when all other evidence indicates that his tongue is anaesthetised. Should this shake our belief in the connection between sensation and the immediate awareness of taste? Surely not. This connection between feeling and power – the very words are eloquent in the extreme – is one that those who conceive of the will as being extended beyond the limbs to the ‘great beyond’, are content to ignore. Thus, are the mystic tele-kinesists supposed to ‘feel’ the object whose movement they ‘will’? The tendency to brush sand over this problem is one of the multiple determinants of the puzzling nature of the question: ‘Why cannot the will be directed beyond the body?’ Justice must be done to the factor of feeling in any fully constituted physical action. This I am attempting to do in Cases (ζ ) and (η). (c) Throwing away the descriptive ladder I am still searching for the ‘missing link’. Thus, I now want a case somewhere between the case in which the subject who says or thinks ‘Move!’ to any nearby object ‘just knows’ it will move, and that of a limb suspended in midair. That is, a case that avoids the ε-failings of inexplicable knowledge and 8

See chapters 5 to 8 for a discussion of this problem.

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employment of internal act trigger and anaesthesia, as well as the ζ -failing of acting upon a detached part of the body. What of the following? (η) I am holding a pen in my right hand and writing with it. I look around and find that the section of my arm between wrist and shoulder has vanished and that my hand is suspended in mid-air! I then move my left hand over to that hand and take hold of it; it comes away easily from the position it occupies, and now it seems to me that I have no right hand: I cannot obey any orders to move my right hand, I feel nothing where previously I felt feelings, and so on. I then examine this peculiar hand, and, weirdly, to all intents and purposes it appears merely to be a piece of rubber shaped like a hand and painted so as to increase the resemblance! Scientific scrutiny confirms that it is indeed no more than rubber. If we place this object in certain positions it stays in place, and from then on I can exert my will upon it. Is this the required exertion of the will on extra-bodily objects? Do we not here immediately and without internal prompting of any kind perform a deed that is the moving of an extra-bodily object? Well, in my opinion this example suffers from the defect of being too fantastic. For what is the point of having the hand made of rubber? Why not have it made of flesh and blood and nerves and bone? I think the answer is: it is in this example made from rubber precisely for the reason that it is nerves and muscles and suchlike that occur in the explanation of the movement of our limbs. For the example I described unquestionably borders on the miraculous, and it is no accident that it does. Indeed, we must all along have unconsciously sought the near-miraculous. For there is after all nothing especially distinctive or significant in the look or feel of muscular or brain tissue – as opposed to the look or feel of rubber or a thousand other substances. It is the knowledge we have accumulated concerning the structure and function of the brain, and not its sensory properties, that makes us reject as fantastic the idea of someone with a lump of sponge rubber in his cranium! The choice of a rubber hand in the above example was misleading: it amounts to a slight and deceptive concession to the way things are – rubber is flexible and fingers can be flexed – and manages in that way to conceal the fact that we are dealing with miraculous happenings. Instead of a rubber hand I might just as easily have made it a hand of diamond or of water! And now perhaps the time has come to acknowledge that it is possible that this entire sequence of examples offends on the very count on which we disposed of this last example. For it may be that what we postulate in those examples is in the final analysis inconsistent with the most general principles underlying physical theory. Yet I would take this to be no

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weakness in the philosophical enterprise. For these examples would then turn out to have been a philosophical device which, rather as the mathematical invention of imaginary numbers helped in the solution of certain equations, would have had the function of enabling us to lay bare the elements of an important a priori concept. If that is so, then this present point in the discussion is known as that of ‘throwing away the ladder’. And we should say of the foregoing descriptive enterprise that it has been one of ‘talking nonsense in order to cure ourselves of talking nonsense’, as Wittgenstein, in so many words, expressed it.

chapter 4

Magic versus mechanism in action

I have been attempting to extend the extension of ‘willed event’ beyond the confines of the body. First, by considering cases of the remote control of physical objects; second, by introducing extra-bodily elements into physical actions. The first project ran into three difficulties: that the uses of ‘know’ could not be made to tally with those operative in cases of physical action; that the putatively willed extra-bodily physical phenomenon had to be triggered into existence by a distinct internal act; and that it occurred in an object the subject could not ‘feel’. The second project seemed capable of coping with these difficulties: for case (ζ ) presented us with a situation in which the use of ‘know’ was as it should be, and in which no distinct internal act caused the movement of the detached and sensitive hand. However, this example suffered from the defect that the detached hand must yet be accounted part of the body, so that the will here failed to move an extra-bodily object. Example (η) coped with this problem by introducing a ‘hand’ no one could mistake for a part of the body: a rubber hand; but at the cost of introducing unintelligibility into the description! Thus, in the attempt to extend the will beyond the body, we find ourselves torn between two alternatives: between a willing that is bona fide but still of the bodily, and a putative willing that is certainly of the extra-bodily but far from bona fide! This chapter is concerned with coming to terms with the factor that lies at the heart of the latter difficulty: the factor whose neglect constitutes the source of the unintelligibility of Example (η). I mean, that easily passed over but absolutely basic element of action: mechanism. Let us see why it tends to be obscured from view. 1. is it a m etaphysical fact that i can move my arm? (a) How one might come to believe so Let us suppose that I raise my arm for no other reason than to give a signal. Then it follows that this latter sentence must provide a complete explanation 141

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of the occurrence of an act of arm raising. Then since the act of arm raising entails the occurrence of an event of arm rise, it looks as if we must have here a complete explanation of the occurrence of an event of arm rise. Yet only in a sense can that be true. For such a statement makes it appear as if, when act-desires cause physical actions, all that needs to be known is that a certain desire was uniquely efficacious and that a bodily movement was willed, if we are to have the (complete and final) explanation of the occurrence of that movement. Such a line of thinking forces upon us the image of an agent standing in an absolutely immediate causal relation to the limb whose movement he wills. For it can seem as if nothing else is involved in this transaction besides agent and limb, so that one is, so to speak, in perfectly direct contact with it when one wills its movement. Thus, one can come to believe that, when we will limb movement, we must do so without the intervention of anything, and a fortiori without the intervention of a mechanism. In this way certain peculiarities of the bodily act situation can lead, first to the stifling of the question, ‘Why does limb movement occur when one wills limb movement?’, for it supposes that all possible questions have been answered when we learn that the limb movement was willed; second, to the repudiation of the whole concept of act-mechanism. However, we then find ourselves saddled with a decidedly unattractive theory of physical action. For if we dispense altogether with mechanism in bodily action, and suppose that nothing other than the will is to be invoked in explanation of limb movements that are willed, it then seems to be a sort of basic and inexplicable datum that (say) one’s arm can be made to move by one in this way: something beyond scientific explanation: a metaphysical fact! That is, an ultimate so to say God-decreed truth for which there can be neither common or garden empirical nor deep scientific explanation, which we should accept rather as we blindly accept the reality of colour, energy, time, beauty. For if the only valid explanation of arm movements that are willed is to be found in phenomena like desire, decision, and will, ought we not conclude that it is a ‘higher’ and metaphysical fact that I can move my arm? Does it not simply float clear of Physical Nature? Indeed, is it not literally meta-physical? Thinking in this way we may feel that there is nothing objectionable in the (above) example (η) of the rubber hand. It may simply seem to be a case of a very unusual ‘higher’ event, instead of a very common ‘higher’ event (viz. willing the movement of limbs). Thus, we can see that the metaphysical notion of ‘extending the will beyond the body’, and the idea

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that it is a metaphysical fact that I can move my limbs, are connected: the latter underpins the former. For notice that those who say that chairs might some day be willed to move like arms, are not interested in claiming that we might have had a rigid limb with all the sensory properties of a chair – which is unexceptionable. They are interested in the fact that a chair is a material object that is composed, not just of hard brown stuff, but of wood; for otherwise, what would be the point of the claim? And this brings it out that part of the reason for unease over the metaphysical assertion that the will might be extended beyond the body, lies in the fact that it implies that there is no such thing as a scientific explanation of the fact that one can will the movement of one’s limbs. (b) Reconciling willing with mechanistic scientific fact There is a genuine puzzle which inclines us towards this view: a puzzle over the reconcilability of mechanism and will; and this chapter is concerned with the resolution of that puzzle. In this way we shall be grappling with one of the main sources of the urge to say: ‘I cannot will the movement of extra-bodily objects.’ This part of the discussion enables me to weed out an important and obscurantist determinant of that remark, and brings me significantly closer to being in a position to describe a non-metaphysical case of ‘extending the will beyond the body’: something which I (more or less) accomplish at the end of this chapter. In the ensuing discussion I shall be concerned with the suggestion that there is an irreconcilable clash between the concept of physical action and the claims of certain sciences. Now at first blush there does appear to be some sort of conflict – but scarcely one of moment. Thus, in everyday life we tend to assume that there is no more to be asked concerning an event of arm movement, once we know that a particular act-desire caused an arm moving act that is manifest in this movement. Accordingly, questions like ‘What did you do to make it move?’ and ‘Why did it move?’ come in this way to be judged as out of place in such ordinary practical circumstances. And yet at the same time we all of us know that scientists are able to tell us why it was that one’s arm moved; for a physiologist might say: ‘In voluntary behaviour the muscles receive neural impulses which cause them to contract, and the movement of the arm is brought about in this way.’ Does such a scientific account of the situation come into collision with the previous informal account? Well, just supposing it did significantly clash, how is the physiologist to communicate the truth of which he is

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unquestionably apprised? Is he merely to claim that voluntary movement is preceded by contraction of the muscles? But he wishes to say more than that: he wants to make the true claim that if (say) the tendons were severed from the bone, we would be unable to move the arm. Then is it, perhaps, that we do not expect the muscles to contract so much, to be quite so tense, in voluntary as in merely reflex movement? But absolutely identical changes could occur in the arm, and for that matter in the spinal cord, in both voluntary and reflex movement. Physically, these two phenomena may differ only cerebrally. There is a physical (non-metaphysical) explanation of the fact that people can move their arms and not the lobe of their ears. Namely, that while there exists the neurological and muscular equipment that permits certain select brain events to cause arm movement, nothing comparable exists in the case of the lobe of the ears. And this fact is truly explanatory. For suppose the bone of someone’s arm was made of an enormously heavy substance, so that it took twenty horses to move the arm; then would it not be fantastic if he could move it with ease? If his forearm weighed ten tons, it would be physically impossible for him to move it. After all, his muscles would snap long before his forearm would move. Simple experiments carried out with a piece of wire and weights could establish this. So where is the metaphysical fact? One is inclined to say that it is metaphysically possible for people to move their arms; but if that were so, then if the above person could not move his ten-ton arm, we should, oddly enough, have to describe that also as a metaphysical fact! While if he can, that too would have to be just another metaphysical fact! Suppose someone’s arm was wholly lacking in musculature, indeed little more than skeletal in character. Would it not be fantastic if he could play the piano with this arm? We might search for invisible nervous connections and the like; when we fail to find them, the movement of these fingers begins to appear miraculous in character. It is no coincidence that statues, trees, and mountains, go walking only in dreams, fairy tales, and legends. Then it is salutary to contrast with this fantastic situation the everyday phenomenon of moving a finger. At once we are released from the realm of the miraculous or magical, and are returned forthwith to the domain of the causally explicable. Whereas the seemingly miraculous movements of those skeletal fingers comes close to some of the bizarre situations described in the examples (α)–(η) in the previous chapter 3, an ordinary example of active finger movement is an event of an altogether different ilk: it is neither a magical nor a miraculous occurrence, and falls full square within the province of the physical sciences.

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2. the un it y of agent and mechanism reflect ed in speech-pragmatics (a) An interiorist theory as an attempted resolution of the conflict We cannot seriously regard it as a ‘higher’ fact that one cannot move a ten-ton arm; and this insight bears decisively against the suggestion that it is a ‘higher’ fact that human beings can move their limbs. We expect to find a physical explanation of the movement of a limb when the limb is moving because it is being willed to move, and the example of the ten-ton arm is designed to act as a sort of smelling salts to bring one around to this obvious truth. It reminds us of the fact that throughout a biological system there occur text-book instantiations of the phenomena studied by physics, and that physical theory may be expected to explain both arm movements that are willed and arm movements that are not willed. And yet, despite this undeniable truth, there can be no doubt that a conflict exists between the concepts of action and of mechanism, a conflict which will only come fully into the open later. That conflict was already visible in the simple situation in which agent and scientist offered their diverse explanations of the occurrence of a physical movement that the agent had willed. For some reason this explanatorial diversity poses problems which we have yet to confront. One proposed way of resolving the conflict is the following. It might be claimed that when I move my head, two distinct yet causally related events happen nearly synchronously: the first affirmed by ‘I willed my head to move’; the second by ‘My head moved’; and both are asserted in the complex claim: ‘I moved my head’. Moreover, the first-mentioned event, willing-of-the-movement-of-the-head, is said to be exclusively susceptible of explanation in terms of purpose, whereas the second event, head movement, is entirely explicable through invoking the causal power of muscular and neural events. Accordingly, the resolution of the problem is simple. We first provide a logical analysis of ‘He moved his head’: into ‘His head moved’ and ‘He willed that’ (or some such); and interpret these two sentences as asserting the occurrence of distinct events. Then noting that these two events (that are) asserted by (the complex) ‘He moved his head’ have different kinds of explanation, we recognise that to apply both explanatory types to the moving of the head would be tantamount to making the false assumption that there exists an automatic explanatory transfer from the constituent events of a set of events onto the set itself. Thus, our explanatory troubles have been born of this simple confusion. Herewith, the problem vanishes:

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head movement has its (immediate) physical explanation; willing of head movement has its (immediate) mental explanation; and moving the head can look after itself. And that is that. (b) The unity of agent and mechanism as reflected in speech-pragmatics (1) I reject this dissolution of the problem, for two reasons. The first reason is, that I reject the thesis that limb moving is analysable into the conjunction of two distinct events: the willing of limb movement, and limb movement. However, this question has yet to be properly investigated.1 My main reason for not following up this supposed dissolution of the difficulty is different. It is that the problem of reconcilability exists equally for this theoretical account. That is, the question: ‘did I produce this limb movement, or did the musculature?’ is equally pressing for such a theoretical account. And so the conflict between action and mechanism refuses to vanish and is already visible in the situation in which agent and scientist offer their diverse explanations of the occurrence of a movement that the agent has willed. However, before I pursue this question, it helps to consider the speech-pragmatics of the situation. For here we discover no great problem of reconciliation. And this is illuminating, for it puts us in a better position to appreciate the essential interdependence of the power of an animal and its musculature. For consider the following. When I move my head to look at something, while it would be true to say, ‘Just then the contraction of certain muscles made my head move’, it would mislead many of one’s hearers were one to actually say so: for speech conventions are such that most people would deduce from my utterance the false proposition: he did not move his head. Nevertheless, were a physiologist to be commenting upon the identical act he may well say: ‘When he performed the act of moving his head, what happened was that these muscles contracted, pulled at this tendon, and thereby made his head move’; and doubtless this would be true, perfectly intelligible, and totally unmisleading. Thus, we have here a mere contextual distinction: ordinarily one’s saying ‘My muscles did it’ would pragmatically imply ‘I did not do it’, whereas a physiologist’s saying the same would pragmatically leave the question open. Then who is right? Clearly, since we are concerned with no more than pragmatics, both can be right, even though their implications are at loggerheads; that is, from the point of view of pragmatics. While from the fundamental point of view of truth, it is certain that both muscle contraction and I had a mutually dependent responsibility for the movement of the arm when I moved it. 1

See chapter 12.

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The diversity of the informal and scientific speech enterprises is consistent, not merely with the lack of oppositon between their subject-matter, but with their fundamental unity. (2) Thus, I do not oppose the efficacy of an animal and its musculature; which is to say, that I endorse the concept of act-mechanism. Therefore while it is true that my arm rose because the muscle contracted, this does not make muscle contraction the source of the movement in opposition to me. And to resist this claim is not to suppose that I and my muscles were jointly responsible for the event, rather as if the Rylean ghost (me) were to lend his accommodating body-machine a ghostly helping ‘hand’! For we know that muscle contraction is a sufficient conditon of arm rise and stands in no need of a bolstering further contribution from oneself the agent. And once again, this is to endorse the concept of act-mechanism. For the concept of act-mechanism is such that act-mechanism and actagent cannot be independent and mutually competing causal forces, any more than the artistic and technical gifts of an artist can be in conflict. Rather is it that the agent effects through the mechanism’s effecting. That is, a mechanism’s effecting something is an agent’s effecting something, provided the mechanism’s functioning stands in certain requisite relations to certain mental phenomena. For the truth is, that it is the contraction of the muscles that enables one to move one’s head, even though it is not why one moved one’s head. For while we say: ‘Without the contraction of those muscles I would not have moved my head’ and ‘Without the contraction of those muscles my head would not have moved’ and ‘Without the contraction of those muscles I would not have been able to move my head’, so that we assume that muscle contraction must at least be a necessary condition of the occurrence of the act, we do not say: ‘If those muscles had contracted it would have brought about my moving my head.’ In short, we do not regard it as a sufficient condition of the act, even though we believe it is a necessary internal structural condition of its occurrence. And once again, this is to endorse the concept of act-mechanism. 3. a dialectical synthesis of the concepts of act and mechanism (a) ‘Either the muscles did it or I did it and not both’ cannot be conjured away with a slogan I do not oppose the efficacy of an agent and of the physical means he employs. On the contrary, I suppose them to be one. And when we

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differentiate pragmatic from truth considerations, distinguishing the special concerns of science from our typical everyday concerns, the situation is to a degree clarified. But it would be a grave and facile error to suppose it resolved by such superficial means. We shall soon see that a deep and conflicting tension continues to hold between the concepts of action and mechanism, in spite of the above pragmatic situation. For some reason, as yet undiscovered, one still wishes in those active situations to press the question: ‘Which is the true agency, the person or his muscles?’ I will bring this buried impulse to the light of day by means of a not altogether fantastic phantasy. Thus, let us suppose that, unknown to me, the muscle in my arm is a little man living beneath the skin, who reads off on a screen what the neural impulse is ‘telling’ the muscle to do, pulls at the tendon, and moves the forearm. Are we to say that I, the little man, or both of us, are responsible for the movement of the arm? What price reconcilability doctrines here! Thus, suppose I were of murderous intent, bent upon killing someone, and a stabbing event comes about in the above bizarre manner. Surely I should be charged with no greater crime than plotting or at worst attempting murder, whereas that little demon should be charged with murder proper! For he did not have to do what I intended and tried to do: he is, after all, not a slave, is free to refuse, not in my employ, and is fully apprised of the effects of pulling at the tendon. So surely he, and not I, moved that arm. So surely we should, in everyday examples of physical action, say that the muscles, and not I, are responsible for the movement of the limb. (In despite of ordinary language.) In either case two physical entities, neither of which was me, brought about the identical effect in the identical manner. What more does one need to settle this question? After all, what else is relevant? The fact that something that is not identical with the subject, viz., his musculature, causes the phenomenon he is said to ‘will’, viz. limb movement, was a fact that in the previous section 2 we had taken in our stride. It now looks as if it may after all be a reason for supposing that the putative agent did not do what he seemed to do. The example of the little man strongly suggests it. (b) ‘Either the muscles or I did it and not both’ is sometimes valid. When? (1) The above line of thought can be further developed in the following way. I begin by noting an altogether obvious but nonetheless eloquent truth. Namely, that at the very instant in which one means to begin moving a limb, the muscles controlling that limb are just beginning to contract and bring

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about movement in the limb. This simple truth might seem to suggest, in the manner of the example of the little man beneath the skin, that contrary to all appearances the mechanism and not the subject is the origin of the movement he is said to have ‘willed’. Before we go any further I would like to put it on record that I am convinced that there actually are occasions when the above argument, viz. ‘The muscle began to contract at precisely the instant at which he was going to move his arm and therefore it was the muscle and not he that moved his arm’ – is entirely valid. Only they are not, in my opinion, the usual occasion. Now this fact is of course important in its own right. But it has the additional merit of requiring us to sharpen our account of the mechanistic situation prevailing in conditions of normality. For we need to pinpoint what precisely it is about the normal physical act situation that renders it immune from this attack. Thus, my fundamental criticism of the line of attack under consideration is, not that it is in itself a malformed argument, but that it has been applied to the wrong situation and is therefore as it stands an incomplete argument. Therefore in the discussion that follows I shall attempt to gain a better understanding, a more differential picture, of the everyday mechanistic situation. Without that, my rejection of that argument can carry no real force. And with it, it does. (2) How am I to come by that ‘better understanding’, that ‘more differential picture’? Not, I think, by developing any further the above critique of the concept of act-mechanism. Rather, by first managing to describe with some precision the conditions under which the above argument finds application, and then separating out from the normal active situation those of its features which render it immune from such attack. For this latter information is the ultimate goal of this inquiry. Now one might easily suppose that there could be no such thing as a point of application for that argument. Thus, we might be inclined to say, thinking of Wittgenstein’s statement: ‘Voluntary movement is marked by the absence of surprise’,2 that if someone intended to move his arm in a certain determinate manner at some instant t1 and so expected it to move in that way at t1 , and if at exactly t1 his arm proceeded to move in precisely that way, and assuming that at t1 he considers himself to have brought about the whole of just that movement, then no matter what happened in his body we must attribute the movement to him. And this would be tantamount to asserting that the argument lacks application. But there can 2

Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953, 629.

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be no doubt that the above claim would be mistaken. To bring this out, let me begin by pointing out that there could be such a thing as finding one’s arm move in exactly the manner in which one was going to move that arm, only a second too soon, in such circumstances that we would refuse to locate that movement under an active heading. Then let this interval of a second shrink to nothing. To what state of affairs would that correspond? If we are fixated on the feature of absence of surprise, we may suspect that this conceptual recipe corresponds to no real case. I disagree. But I acknowledge that a certain inexactitude exists in the specification of the case. This is because several distinct situations match this as yet insufficiently determinate description. Those several cases can be suitably specified. And one of them is that sought-after situation in which, for purely physical reasons, we would be forced to conclude that the subject would be mistaken in attributing the movement of his arm to himself. That is to say, one and perhaps only one of these cases provides the correct point of application for the aforementioned argument (which was highlighted by the example of the little man housed in the arm), viz. ‘The muscle moved at precisely the instant at which he was going to move his arm, and therefore it was the muscle and not he that moved that arm.’ I shall now lead up to that case through the use of an example that seems to me to be of great significance. The phenomenon envisaged in this case is the act-analogue of those perceptual illusions in which the internal object of the inner phenomenon happens – though for ‘the wrong reasons’ – to be matched by an external object. (For action, like perception, suffers from a ‘problem of error’.) The example, which is set out below, demonstrates how it is that in act-situations gross error is possible in optimum first-person epistemological conditions. (c) ‘Act error’ in optimum epistemological circumstances Suppose that a psychological subject is performing regular trained actions. For example, at t1 exactly, and with his elbow anchored at a fixed point on a table, he moves his hand at a specified rate along a graduated path traced out on that table. We shall assume that this has been laboriously practised and that he can perform it to perfection. Furthermore, we suppose in addition that we have installed a special machine which can both interrupt the cerebral ‘message’ to the musculature, and cause the arm to make whatever movement we choose. Finally, let us assume that we have ‘programmed’ the machine to interrupt the ‘message’ in this case, and then to generate the very movement the subject has rehearsed. Accordingly, at t1 when he

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is to begin moving his arm a bell rings to inform him of the fact, and a mere minuscule instant later the machine swings into action. We see his arm move in exactly the required way. Would we expect him to know that something strange was afoot? If practically no effort was required to perform acts of this kind, if it was merely a slow easy sliding of an arm down a gentle slope, I do not think we would judge it a markedly odd fact if the subject were to notice nothing untoward. Nevertheless, it might be the case that, even though he notices nothing, he yet could not obey the order: ‘Now keep your arm still.’ This, in my opinion, is something of which he could be grossly ignorant. And if I am right, it is a matter of some genuine moment. It means that both the capacity to exert one’s will and the actual achievements of the will, do not as such announce their presence in immediate and mentalistic fashion to the consciousness of the agent, and even in optimum epistemological conditions. This important epistemological trait marks bodily willings off sharply from such familiar psychological phenomena as thoughts, emotions, images, etc. And it lines them up significantly with perceptual phenomena. (For comparable perceptual illusions can readily be imagined.) It is clear that the subject in the above experiment cannot have been the active source of the movement of his own arm. For if the machine robbed him completely of the capacity to direct his arm, whether to move it or halt it, whether in one rather than another way, then under those circumstances we would be compelled to conclude that he had nothing to do with that movement: we should have to conclude that he did not move his arm. And yet he thought that he did! Therefore, without needing to invoke the working of self-deception or any other mental mechanism, it has become clear that one can be mistaken in thinking one is actively moving a limb that is there and then moving. This is an extremely important point in the philosophy of action. It proves that in physical action there can be no such thing as an immediate experience of a causal nexus immediately linking an internal phenomenon with its outer phenomenal object. (Pace Magical Volitionism.) Moreover, to the extent that this example comes as something of a surprise, to whatever degree one marvels at the idea of one’s arm moving along some path while one is simultaneously engaged in a completely ineffectual process of willing that is directed towards just such a movement, to that same extent I suggest one is in the grip of magical volitionism. Since many may find the imagined possibility at first a little surprising, one would be justified in concluding that magical volitionism lurks in the hidden recesses of our minds. If that surmise is true, it indicates that philosophical analysis has work to do.

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From the above case of error we can easily construct the case it was meant to bring to light. That is, a case in which the muscles of some limb contract at exactly the time of an intended movement, but in such circumstances that, even though the subject believes he moved that limb, the movement was not his doing. For example, it may be that some bodily phenomenon occurring outside the brain, say a spasm in the musculature that is induced by salt deficiency, brings about exactly the kind of arm rise that was intended at exactly the intended time. (More exactly, an imperceptibly slight fraction of a second before the neurological message from the brain reached the operative muscle.) Would not this compel us to say that, even though the surface phenomenon exactly matched a putatively expressed intention, both in content and timing, no act of arm raising occurred? Would it not be just sheer coincidence? Then here is the required example in which the argument, instead of being directed indiscriminately against mechanism as such, finds its suitably differentiated and correct point of application. Here we say: ‘The muscle began contracting just as he meant to begin moving his arm, and therefore he did not do what he meant to do’; and the argument, while incompletely stated, is valid.

(d) Why the normal mechanistic situation is consistent with willing (1) We have discovered the point of application for the above argument, through constructing an unusual physical-act situation involving coincidental mechanistic events. What I have now to do is discover what the relevant differences are between that special situation and the ordinary situation, which suffices to make the former but not the latter vulnerable to this mode of attack. This I do in the next section (4). To achieve this end we must first here in (1) return to the example of the little man housed beneath the skin. What, in the light of the above discussion, is the proper characterisation of that case? I think it evident that it is barely distinguishable from the act-illusion described above in which, thanks to the workings of a machine, the subject had quite unbeknown to him lost all control over his moving limb. And that demonstrates, what was in any case apparent, that the little man and not I brought about the movement of my arm. But ought not that conclusion to perturb us? For if that is how matters stand, how can the will be operative in ordinary examples of the movement of limbs? Ought we not to conclude that action and mechanism are irreconcilably antagonistic concepts? And that all seeming bodily actions that are really bodily actions are immediate and so to say

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ultimate bringings about: the mind of the subject infinitely proximate to the effect it wreaks: magically close to one another: physics put to one side? Plainly, this argument is invalid. It may be that we are assuming that all instances of causation within the body occur in physical situations of the same very general type, even though the heterogeneity of the above examples demonstrates that they do not. Then my aim in this present section 3 is to show that certain examples of the bodily causation of the movement of limbs by the musculature, such as those that take their cue from the example of illusion involving the special machine, actually come into irreconcilable collision with the claim that the bodily movement was willed. And at the same time to indicate why it is that the normal examples of active bodily causation do not. In this way we manage to form a clearer picture of the distinctive nature of the mechanisms operative in a healthily acting body. The belief, elaborated at the beginning of this chapter, that the will is a faculty for bringing about phenomena in a manner closely akin to the magical, comes from failing to comprehend the wide-ranging variety of bodily causal situations that might conceivably lead to an event of limb movement which we take to be willed by us. Only one such situation is consistent with the willing of that event, even though all of the others present the same immediate epistemological front to first- and third-person alike. For note: The will is characterised by absence of surprise – of a certain sort. But it is also characterised by the working of mechanism – also of a certain sort. More, the facts or circumstances surrounding that requisite type of mechanism are themselves of a certain kind. Now we will soon see that the type of the mechanism, and the character of those attendant facts or circumstances, which consist in the applicability of certain conditionals, can be brought into a unity. That is, they prove to be different aspects of the one reality. For what they manifest, and what the mechanism is, are one. (2) I will now try to show how much was involved and concealed in the substitution of a little man for a muscle in the previous argument. This enterprise will at one stroke bring to light the aforementioned unity and defeat the argument designed to set the concepts of action and mechanism at daggers drawn. Of course, it is natural to think of that substitution as relatively innocent since in each case ‘something – which is not the agent – exerts a force upon and brings about movement in the arm’. But this sentence bemuses us. For now suppose that the little man were always to do what I attempted to do; for it may be that he is in a permanently drugged condition of slavery: a ‘mere human cog’ as one might say. Then

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although it would remain true that he and not I moved my arm, nothing of great moment would follow from that fact. Thus, the responsibility for the movement would be entirely mine (so that I and not he would presumbly face a murder ‘rap’), I know what my arm is going to do next (and he may well not), and so on. And so we can see how much stems from the insertion, not of a mere causally efficacious entity that is non-identical with oneself – which in itself implies little of interest, but of a choosing mind. Unlike an element in a mechanism, such an item cannot but rob one of one’s powers. And that carries the strict implication, such an item cannot but rob one of one’s deeds. Then turning from this case to an everyday example of arm moving, we note the following. What made us say of the subject that he had nothing to do with the movement of his arm – in the example of act-illusion that was produced by the special machine – was the absence of a variety of features that are present in ordinary examples of physical action. Namely, those features that are the necessary accompaniments of a legitimate mechanism and which are indeed essentially unified with it. I refer to the applicability of a set of conditionals, which are such as to ensure the existence of a power. For the normal human agent can when he chooses stop the movement of his arm, whereas the man linked to that machine could not; and he can speed up or slow down, and that man could not; and so on. Thus, for those crucial few seconds the subject in the machine example was completely denuded of all such powers. Now these various capacities, summed up in the concept of the having of power or control over a limb, are of decisive importance so far as the occurrence of a physical action is concerned, and they are additional to the feature of absence of surprise. It is internal to the concept of a legitimate act-mechanism that it confers such powers upon its owner, and herein lies the essential unity between the inherence of a legitimate mechanism and the applicability of a battery of psycho-physical conditionals. They are one state of affairs. Herewith a dialectical synthesis of the seemingly opposed bodily and psycho-physical requirements of physical action is effected. 4. interiorist denials of the problem (a) Interiorist denials of the problem of reconciling physical action with mechanism (1) One natural objection against the argument – ‘Just as he was about to move his arm, his muscles began to contract, therefore the movement was not due to him’ – was that absence of surprise, together with certain

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other occurrent psychological phenomena, constitute the definitive marks of action. We have seen that this criticism is itself decidedly vulnerable, and rests on a quasi-magical theory of action whereby the agent is taken to stand in immediate contact with whatever event he wills. Now criticising this criticism has enabled us to see the importance in physical action of the factor of mechanism, together with its highly differential character; so that rather as ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’, we may affirm as a slogan that ‘action is the utilisation of mechanism’. In either case we succeed in pegging down to earth a concept which otherwise stands in grave danger of taking off into a resistanceless stratosphere. Now this confused criticism had arisen out of the attempt to resolve an apparent clash between the concepts of willing and of mechanism – concepts which we are loath to keep necessarily apart – by denying the very existence of the problem, by rejecting the relevance of mechanism. (2) But this resolution may fail to satisfy those who are much impressed by the fact that action is an experience, that bodily action has an inner as well as an outer face. To bring out what it might be that such people find objectionable in the above line of reasoning, I will at this point expand a little on the earlier interiorist attempt (in section 2(a)) to sidestep the problem of the apparent clash between the concept of physical action and the part played by mechanism in action. Thus, some might claim that this problem vanishes once we realise, either that action divides into a separate ‘inner’ and active part together with an inactive ‘outer’ part, or that action itself is an ‘inner’ event which characteristically is accompanied by an ‘outer’ event. Expressed in these terms, no problem seems to arise, for mechanism would then govern no more than the non-active ‘outer’ phenomenon, while purpose and desire govern the ‘inner’ event. Thus, no clash seems to occur. But why suppose that action is a distinctive experience which takes place in the inner world? In reply it might be urged that ‘surely we all know what it is like to act!’ And this is surely true. But of which experience are we speaking? I ask because there is more than one ‘experience of action’. For example, there is one experience of agency, which is undoubtedly a phenomenon of the inner life, but which is of little theoretical significance. Thus, I could imagine someone who had been pathologically inert (catatonic) saying, ‘After such a long time to find oneself actually doing something is the strangest of experiences’, and then, ‘You feel as if you were racing through space’ or ‘as if you were made of quicksilver’. This experience would naturally be described as ‘an experience of acting’, for under these special conditions one’s own carrying out of an activity, of any activity, is experienced in a

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certain way. However, this phenomenon tells us little about action itself; for the experience may vary from person to person, and for many people there may be no such thing; and that implies that action can neither be nor necessitate that experience. At once the experience loses all theoretical interest. The above experience can neither be nor be part of the doing of a deed. Rather is it how the doing is experienced. Compare: a man who sees for the very first time reports: ‘I felt as if I was pressed right up against the World’ or ‘as if I was engulfed in a new medium’. Then while this is an ‘experience of seeing’, it is not the visual experience itself. And so it is in the case of the above ‘experience of agency’. What an interiorist analysis of bodily action requires is, that there exists an experience which is of a properly ‘inner’ kind, which is active in character, and which is necessarily present whenever we act. Is there such a thing? Well, even though the claim is contentious, and is fully substantiated only later in this work,3 I believe that there is a phenomenon which comes very close to answering these specifications, but which falls short on the vital count of interiority. I mean, the psychological phenomenon of willing. The arguments I shall marshal seem to me to demonstrate that acting is a psychological phenomenon of type willing, that the phenomenon is of the type experience, but that it is not a phenomenon of the inner life – which is what any properly interiorist theory requires. However, so far these are merely claims. (3) Nevertheless there can be no doubt that the attractions of an interiorist analysis are considerable. Thus, we protest against having the reality of actions ‘dissolve into conditionals’, as seemed to happen in the example of the machine. For in that example it seemed that whether or not the will was operative depended upon what happened when the machine was switched off, and suchlike seeming irrelevancies. That is, upon a set of conditionals. For it is perfectly natural for one who is moving an arm and knowing that he is to have the thought: ‘There must be something of a psychological nature, here and now present to me and experienced, that enables me to immediately know that this arm movement is being willed by me.’ It is natural – and it pushes one towards an interiorist account of the situation – and yet it looks for the impossible if it searches for something of a psychological nature that can act as a near infallible guarantee that a movement in one’s body is being willed. This was decisively demonstrated by the example of the machine in section 3(c), which brought to our notice the existence of first-person present tense act illusions in which the internal phenomenon 3

See chapters 12 and 16.

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is matched by the type of external object it posits. In any case there can be little doubt that it is the above ‘perfectly natural thought’ that leads us to postulate an essentially ‘inner’ character for action, and to underestimate the significance of mechanism in action. (b) The ontological ambiguity or Janus-facedness of physical action It is very important that we give due weight to the considerations which induce some people to opt for an interiorist analysis of bodily willing – since these are considerations which any mechanistically oriented account is in danger of neglecting. For physical action is ontologically two-faced. And we tend to lose sight of this fact. Thus, there is on the one hand an inclination to say of the case where I mistakenly think I have moved my arm – which in fact stayed all the while by my side – that ‘I unsuccessfully moved my arm’, thereby adopting an infallibilist interiorist account of physical action; for we betray in this remark the feeling that the achievements of the will are internally self-validating. But our thoughts can go the other way too. For one is on the other hand inclined to say of a genuine act of arm movement that ‘I can only know I have moved my arm when it moves’; and while this is in a sense true, there can be no doubt that this strange remark is expressive of exteriorist thinking: suggesting as it does, through equivocation over tenses, that knowledge of one’s own physical actions waits cap in hand upon both future and verification! Then while the interiorist account calls for exteriorist correction, the latter in turn cries out to be redressed by a theory which does full justice to the evident reality of the first-person ‘inner’ aspect of physical actions. Indeed, one is even inclined to make the aforementioned criticism – viz. ‘One is inclined to say . . . “I only know I have moved my arm when it moves”’ – in such a spirit that it carries the innuendo that I can know I have moved my arm quite independently of what it actually does – as if ‘I moved my arm’ were on all fours with ‘I have a mental image of my moving arm’! Here the ‘inner’ is back with a vengeance; and just as the original inclination corresponded to an assimilation of interiority by exteriority, so this inclination ‘on the rebound’ constitutes an absorption of the third-person properties of physical action by the first-person! Thus, we can see how a rather brutally ‘reductionist’ exteriorist theory of physical action naturally breeds its alien and pallid antithesis: a ‘precious’ idiosyncractic-platitudinish interiorist theory. Extroversion and introversion, so to say. It is evident that these hostile brother theories are different aspects of the one reality. And both correspond to an insufficiently complex,

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and insufficiently synthetic, stage of thinking. Any genuinely dialectically synthetic moment in one’s progressive understanding of the concept of physical action, must do justice both to first-person and third-person truths, and will supersede or transcend the earlier false ‘idealist quasi-magical’ or ‘mechanistically reductionist’ monopolistic theories. Indeed, it is salutary to note that the first-person/third-person distinction, whose distorted representatives these monopolisms are, enables us to differentiate out from the dialectical synthesis the assimilated truths present in that synthesis, without our needing to fall into the arms either of a quasi-magical idealism of physical action or of a destructive physicalistic reductionism. Let us not lose sight of the truly ambiguous and complex character of physical action that is the ultimate source of these difficulties. Thus, the highly enigmatic remark, ‘I only know I have moved my arm when it moves’ – which is in a sense a truth – formulated in a sentence which almost certainly bodies forth a deep confusion – is born of a truly philosophical perplexity. For the act of moving an arm seems in a certain way to be ‘private’, since I do not use any means to tell that I am acting when I am moving my arm. But it seems also in a sense to be ‘public’, for if my arm refuses to move it is no use my assuring you that ‘I am moving it’. Thus, the exterior aspect of the act reflects back on the interior aspect, the act viewed from the inside, and can be used to correct what at first glance appears immune from such correctibility, so that a first-person report might be relinquished in the light of a ‘publicly’ witnessable fact that is open to any third person. This may seem to challenge the autonomy of the first-person report; even to the point of discrediting it. Then faced with these difficulties we might, so to speak, try to identify the act with its first-person aspect. But the situation is richer and more subtle than either of these solutions would allow. In fact, ‘I am moving my arm’ is poised curiously and uneasily between statements like ‘I am thinking of such and such’ and ‘I have brown hair’. This is the source of the special charm, the region of hidden depth, in this whole topic of physical action. In sum: we cannot obliterate the ‘internal’ or first-person aspect of bodily action. Yet misunderstanding its nature can lead to a purely interiorist account of the phenomenon. In this way we may come to deny its exteriorist aspect, sidestep the difficult task of synthesising the two, and fail to grasp the reality and necessity of mechanism. It is for this reason that, concerned with the problem of mechanism, I attach great importance to providing an analysis of the deluded tendencies to identify the physical act with misinterpreted versions of its first-person (interior) or third-person (exterior) aspects.

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5. a summary account (1) Let me now review the findings of this and the previous three chapters. Simultaneously, I hope to draw together three central strands in the discussion. They are: (I) radical volitionism, (2) the supposition that we might will extra-bodily phenomena, (3) the theory of meaning criticised by Putnam whereby the extension of a natural-kind term is said to be wholly determined by an item’s managing to instantiate the constitutive elements of a concept present in the minds of speakers. For these three philosophical positions here go naturally together. But besides this enterprise there remains one outstanding related matter: the attempt to give a use to ‘I can exert my will on extra-bodily entities’. This recalcitrant practical problem is finally resolved at the end of this chapter – and it consists in the description of an example of the non-metaphysical extension of the will beyond the body. This case is a kind of ‘missing link’. At that stage I consider the problem of limits to be solved – or dissolved: a metaphysical utterance will have been persuaded to come down from its heavenly isolation and join up with the rest of the language. This change of environment and manner of life transforms its entire nature. While it sheds certain infinite aspirations in doing so, it is repaid in an even richer coin: it comes to life. (a) A literal interpretation of radical volitionism Here is what is perhaps the most radically interiorist theory of the bodily will. Willing is like a process of electrifying an intangible nerve: one end of the nerve is connected to me, to I, the other end to whatever the will is said to move; and the effect is absolutely immediate. We are offered the following account of willing the movement of a limb. Something happens of a wholly private and mental nature, something resembling an unspoken statement directed at the limb, and this causally and without mediation effects the movement of that limb. Thus, radical volitionism postulates the existence of a mental event that is the infinitely immediate cause of its phenomenal object. A unique mental event through which may be discerned, in almost total purity, the causal bond itself! Even, it may be, a mental event that is the causal nexus phenomenalised! Let us consider this theory at its face value. Suppose I am unable to move my toes. Then suppose that with my ‘mind’s mouth’ I utter the word ‘Move!’, addressing those toes, and they move; I ask them to move in a certain way, for a certain time, and like well-drilled animals at a circus they carry out my commands; and so on. Is this a volit-ing of those bodily

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events? Doubtless it falls short in certain respects; but what is noteworthy is that, in the context of what human beings and animals are generally like, this is about as close as we are ever going to find ourselves to that elusive item. Then it comes, I think, as something of a shock to realise that this might figure in some alarming psychological case history. And so might all everyday cases of this sort; and it is everyday cases that are our concern:4 namely, the movement of our limbs – rather than of our internal organs – or other bizarre phenomena. For what would it be for me to relate to my foot in the way the ‘Rylean’ ghost supposedly related to his haunted machine? Leaving aside the question of sensitivity of limbs, one might say it came near to the model of the ghost in the machine if my saying ‘Move!’ in my ghost mind caused certain neurological occurrences which terminated in the movement of my toes. But, as we have just observed, if I could get my toes to move only by speaking to them, this would almost certainly be no more than an element in my psychopathology. If a schizophrenic began to ‘lose’ the extremities of his body in this way, we would not feel that it was of any great metaphysical moment. He might even reach the sad condition in which, in order to say anything aloud, he had first of all to say it under his breath! It could even be that saying it under his breath was invariably followed by a piece of audible speech over which he had no control! These would just be terrible manifestations of a psychotic disorder (b) The clash between volitionism and the existence of limits upon willing If the role played by the will in effecting bodily change was akin either to the immediate action of a magnet or even to magic, if it was a simple immediate producing of such a character, then whatever can result from (say) a sudden surge of electricity through the brain – (say) a spasmodic act, a momentary belief – ought conceivably to result from willing. But in chapter 1, where we staked a claim for the existence of logical a priori limits upon the will, we encountered good reason for opposing this claim. Logically necessarily, no act is the willing bringing about of any act, and in all probability of any belief or desire either. It is difficult to see how an extreme volitionism can accommodate the existence of such logical limits, seeing that the items in question have phenomenal causes. But let us set 4

‘How much greater is the worth of the real man, compared with any merely desired, dreamed-up, foully fabricated man?’, ‘what justifies man is his reality’. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Skirmishes of an untimely man’, in Twilight of the the Idols (translated by Walter Kaufmann), New York: Viking Press (1960), 32.

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this difficulty aside and consider another and comparable clash between volitionism and the existence of limits to the will’s powers. The volition is supposedly a private mental event, in the sense in which the thought and image are private: namely, in being imperceptible to all and immediately given to one. Then just as we might come to desire the presently undesirable, just as we might eventually see the presently invisible, why should we not sometime will the extra-bodily? And even if volitionism does not strictly imply the intelligibility of this suggestion, it would seem to require no more than a natural extension of ‘will’ for it to do so. For if the electricity in my brain can make a magnetic needle quiver, why should not the power of my will cause a frisson in the curtains? And now we may be thinking that, from the point of view of the willing which is going on in the inner world, the arm can be no more than a different sort of object from (say) those curtains, which are in turn no more than a different sort of object from (say) a belief, rather as if these objects were classifiable in the way we classify different metals according (say) to their physical properties. Thus, we may think of the arm as a sort of conducting substance, one that permits the will to permeate and activate it, while furniture or mountain ranges will count as insulating substances – as if it were a merely contingent property of bedsteads and the Himalayas that they are unresponsive to the will. Then they are here being understood as the analogue in the domain of the will of the merely invisible in the domain of sight. That is, as simply and unproblematically lying outside the range of the will. This indicates a fundamental confusion concerning the nature of physical action, a confusion that can only be resolved by philosophical inquiry into the constitution of the concept of physical action. And that very fact is indicative of an important truth about the sense of active expressions. For it brings to light the existence of a dissimilarity between the concept of a physical action and the concept of a non-psychological natural-kind like gold, which in turn is all of a piece with there being a philosophy of action and not of gold. And yet we also know that in a certain respect these two items bear a significant resemblance to one another. Let me briefly indicate the points of agreement and of disagreement, beginning with the disagreement. But I must first of all indicate the object of disagreement. (c) Comparing physical actions and non-psychological natural kinds like gold The situation in the case of non-psychological items like gold and measles is relatively simple. Here an item is picked out by ‘epistemological pointers’:

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that is, quasi-indexically singled out under a definite description which is usually categorially determinate, e.g. as the disease raging in that city at that time/the red liquid present in the bodies of animals/the stuff of the trunk and boughs of trees. No one at the time need know what are the constitutive criterial properties of those items, and the problem waits upon empirical investigation. Later, deep scientific inquiry may well provide the solution. This at least is the position in the case of the subject-matter of non-behavioural sciences like metallurgy or physiology. With physical actions we encounter what at first appears to be an entirely different state of affairs. And this is nothing but the ‘naturalness’ of radical volitionism, i.e. the fact that radical volitionism is the first ‘moment’ in the advancing dialectic of physical action. For it is natural to suppose that in our own case we are immediately acquainted with all that is relevant to the extension of both ‘arm raising’ and ‘willed event’. Thus, we naturally take ourselves to be placed in immediate relation to each of the following events: an event of willing, a bodily event that is willed, and a supposedly asymmetrical supposedly immediate producing relation between these two. Then whereas we stand ‘on the outer’ with items like gold, peering in as it were through a misty window, here instead we seem to stand altogether ‘on the inner’ towards a publicly perceptible phenomenon. (A momentous fact first noted by Schopenhauer.5 ) And the ‘naturalness’ of radical volitionism is the naturalness of supposing that we stand ab initio at no distance epistemologically from our own acts; so that there can be neither unknown criteria for these phenomena, nor crude error concerning their occurrence on the part of a normal wakeful mind. In short, so far as the feature of quasi-indexical discernment is concerned, physical actions and items like gold look to be entirely unlike. And the truth is, significant dissimilarities do indeed exist – alongside important similarities – which in the final analysis it is my prime concern to indicate. I now proceed to elaborate the dissimilarities. I will concentrate upon three main dissimilarities: (A) (B) (C). (d) Dissimilarities between physical actions and natural kinds like gold (A) Physical actions are experienced psychological events.6 This fact alone determines an unlikeness between arm raising and gold on a significant epistemological count. For the mere fact of being experienced and psychological requires that this event be recognisable in the self and in 5

The World as Will and Representation 1, Book 2, 18, New York: Dover 1958.

6

See chapter 16.

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the other if it is to be recognisable by any self-conscious consciousness anywhere anytime. In consequence, a necessary condition of the extension of ‘act of arm raising’ being available in general is that this phenomenon be mentalistically and therefore also simply or criteria-lessly given to the subject. Now since by ‘extension’ I here have in mind the class of events falling under ‘arm raising’, my claim is not that the phenomenon must be given to the subject as arm raising. It is rather that it must under some heading be mentalistically and criteria-lessly given to him. Nothing like this holds in the case of gold. (B) The second dissimilarity consists in the fact that, in a certain sense of ‘a priori’, the concept of arm raising is a priori-given. Namely: the logically necessary and sufficient conditions of its application are unself-consciously observed by speakers of the language; are to be unearthed by philosophical inquiry; and are not to be discovered by extra-linguistic empirical scientific investigation. And here too nothing like this holds in the case of gold. (C) The third dissimilarity is the following. We identify a particular physical structure as an act-mechanism through empirically establishing that it is of a nature such that a certain set of behavioural conditionals are satisfied by the organism. Therefore a priori constraints exist upon the evidence for an item’s being an act-mechanism, and therefore for an event’s being an act. By contrast, measles and even gold might have had quite different symptomatic ‘markers’ from those they in fact have. Now if that was all that was to be said concerning physical action on the score of identification, it would palpably have been a mistake to have linked this problem with the Putnam/Kripke account of sense and reference. Yet while the Putnam/Kripke theory may well be completely irrelevant to the philosophy of the psychological as such, it connects interestingly nonetheless with the philosophy of physical action, for the reason that physical actions, being ontologically Janus-faced, are an a-typical instance of the category, the psychological. That is, it is precisely this a-typicalness that accounts for the kinship with natural kinds. And it is precisely this a-typicalness that is the source of their special interest. Indeed, of dualaspectism itself. Therefore it underlies our entire enterprise. (e) Similarities between physical actions and natural-kinds like gold (1) I will bring this special character of physical actions into view, first by spelling out the significant similarities between (say) arm raising and gold on the score of identification. But before I do so, a brief word on the concept

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of the criterion. This term of art may be given various senses, noteworthy amongst which are the following. It may be used to designate: (i) logically necessary and sufficient constitutive properties, (ii) logically necessary and sufficient conditions, (iii) the ultimate and definitive test. These three senses of the term are put to use in the ensuing discussion (below). Thus, concerning the difficult area of the psychological I note the following. First, that with highly developed mental phenomena like thoughts, they are best discerned (in others) in uncodified unsystematic manner by those psychologically aware people who understand their human subject in some depth. Second, that while more primitive and undeveloped body-based psychological phenomena like itches or thirst have ultimately signalled their presence to self-conscious language-using man through behaviours and causal conditions, they might nonetheless in the final analysis be equally well discerned physiologically-scientifically. And so these two classes of phenomena differ on the count of identification. Thus, there may be no such thing as the criteria for a man’s having a certain thought, in any of the senses (i) (ii) (iii), while there may exist physiological criteria for a man’s having a pain or being thirsty. Then concerning the phenomenal contents of consciousness I note also, that the subject normally uses no criteria in the first-person present-tense case for a whole range of items, such as images and desires and sensations. On the other hand, he may well do so in the case of psychological items falling within a different range, such as moods or deep motives or changes in character, seeing that he might accept the judgement of an insightful other. (2) This brings me to the main subject of section 5(c) above, viz. the similarity holding between (say) arm raising and gold – a similarity which fails to obtain between gold (etc.) and all other psychological phenomena – with the single exception of perception. The similarity is this. That in the case of arm raising, as also in the case of gold, criteria in sense (ii) are required if we are definitively to demonstrate the presence of the item. That is, a set of logically necessary and sufficient conditions, amongst which in the case of action occurs the condition which has interested us of late, viz. the utilisation of a mechanism. More exactly, it must be a mechanistic device that is the material basis of an active power: a ‘power line’ (as I shall hereafter call it). Thus, when physical action takes place there necessarily occurs at one stroke: the utilisation of a mechanism, of a power line, of a power; so that two concepts, one psychological and the other physiological, power and mechanism, find joint and unified application in dialectical manner in the proper characterisation of this event. Yet

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that a power and mechanism must be employed need not be self-consciously registered by the average speaker, even though it is a priori-disclosable to philosophical inquiry. More, that this unself-consciously assumed necessary condition is in actual fact satisfied in any individual case is only conclusively demonstrable either through scientific means or else through establishing by laborious empirical investigation that a set of conditionals is exemplified. This is what I earlier had in mind when I said of this a priori concept: it has a posteriori-given application conditions. In sum: in any individual instance the average speaker never mentalistically knows that the conditions for physical action are satisfied. (Herewith radical volitionism crashes to its ruin!) For although he is provided with special evidences unavailable to a third-person, nevertheless he and thirdperson alike both stand in need of empirical extra-mental evidence, however automatic and rational may be their beliefs, if they are to know beyond all doubt that an act of arm raising has occurred. Indeed, ultimately first- and third-person are in the same position, in that their capacity to know that arm raising has occurred must derive from their responsiveness to the satisfaction of the same set of logically ncessary and sufficient conditions. 6. a summary account (2) (1) To resume. While ‘arm raising’ is unlike ‘gold’ in the three aforementioned ways, it nonetheless resembles it in the crucial respect just noted. Namely, in neither case is it of any use consulting the immediate deliverances of introspection – whether aided or not by the findings of philosophical reflection – if we are to determine whether some item falls within the extension of the term. This is because of the fact that there exists no set of purely mental criteria of arm raising, in any of the senses (i) (ii) (iii) (above), whereas there do exist (ii)-type criteria – of mixed category – amongst which occurs the non-mental bodily criterion: utilisation of a power line. Thus, while philosophy can apprise us of the necessary and sufficient conditions of arm raising, it has from that point onwards to pass the task over to the physical sciences if we are to discover whether these a priori-given specifications are in any particular instance in fact and absolutely definitively matched by the world. For even though we normally do know without investigation that they are satisfied, and can know with even greater certainty through the use of behavioural conditionals, we are nonetheless always open to the possibility of error of the kind exemplified in the machine example, thanks to the fact of our knowing neither the specific physical content of the non-mental

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(ii)-type criterion, nor knowing mentalistically that it is satisfied. Only scientific depth knowledge can close this last all-important gap. This is a significant point of contact between expressions like ‘arm raising’ and terms of the kind ‘gold’, ‘measles’, ‘lightning’, ‘blood’. Its rationale takes the following form. In either case, an undifferentiated set of unknown but scientifically accessible deep physical properties are quasi-indexically singled out via a set of surface ‘markers’. In the case of the act of arm raising those ‘markers’ are: the occurrence of arm movement, its seeming to the subject that he has moved his arm, the fact that that event occurs on the surface of the body, in a place over which he normally has control, the apparent moderate motor health of the subject, etc. This readily available pre-scientific data, given to first- and third-person alike, renders highly likely, but fails to acually entail, the physically deep phenomena of the kind required if a body-based power is to have been employed and if an act of arm moving is to have occurred. That is, it fails to entail that arm movement came about through utilisation of a power line. Nevertheless, it is impressive evidence, and of quasi law-like force. And it is used as such, though as no more, for the truth of the proposition, albeit unself-consciously, by almost all of us almost all of the time. Now this is also roughly the situation in the case of a natural kind like gold. (2) Then it is precisely this common ground between arm raising and gold that is so flagrantly ignored by those indulging in the metaphysical speculation that ‘the will might extend its empire beyond the skin boundary’ or that ‘the extension of “willed event” might spread into the domain of the inanimate’. For believing as they do that they are concerned with a purely interior event, and supposing as they do that the concept resident in their minds simplistically determines the extension of the term, (as is in fact the case with terms like ‘triangle’, ‘parricide’, ‘cousin’), they naturally assume that it presents no more of a conceptual problem than does the supposition that we might sometime come to hear the (now) inaudible or see the (now) invisible. But what they fail to realise is that in entertaining such a conjecture, they stray beyond the region within which certain natural regularities may with reason be assumed to hold. For example, such quasi-laws as seems-to-one-to-have-raised-one’s-arm → power-line activated; powerline activated → arm rise. And so on. Then their readiness to stray in this fashion beyond the well-attested regions of application, which are reliable precisely because of the rule therein of law, indicates that they cannot but have misunderstood the principles governing the use of ‘arm raise’; and all

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at the behest of a false metaphysical theory of man and action. Hence my talk of a ‘metaphysical use’, which is a metaphysically prompted misuse, of the terms involved. But I, in contradistinction to the doctrine of volitionism, say: if there is no power line to the phenomenon φ, then necessarily there is no act that is the making happen of φ. That is, I believe that this necessary condition imposes an a priori restraint upon our extension of the range of functioning of the will, whether it be within or without the body. For when all is said and done, it is hardly any less bizarre to speak of willing change in certain of our internal organs, than to hypothesise the willing of frissons in the curtains. Therefore when unscientific and philosophically unreflective man strays from the original contexual setting – which is to say, removes himself from select regions on the surface of the body – whether it be into the ‘centre of the earth’ of the internal organs or the ‘inter-stellar space’ of the extrabodily domain – he drops the pilot upon whom he has until now been so successfully and entirely reliant. That is, he finds himself in an inter-stellar space of ideas and is completely disoriented; for he has no sure guide upon which to base the application of his concept: he finds nothing to which he may cling. (As a newly blind man, suddenly finding himself freed of the constraints imposed by sight, has no firm basis for action.) Yet this is not to claim that a scientifically aware philosophically insightful man might not, albeit with difficulty, find his way beyond that matrix terrain. That is, extend the empire of the will into the interior of the body or out into the region of the extra-bodily. But it can only be accomplished through following the path which we have adumbrated. 7. the required non-metaphysical extension of t he will beyond the bo dy I shall conclude Part I of this work by describing one more case. Here we have a case in which we bring together the following requisite elements of the a priori-given concept of an intentional physical action. Namely: the existence of knowledge of the impending occurrence of the phenomenal goal, of immediate knowledge, of explicable transparent knowledge, given by the appropriate use of ‘just know’, in a bringing about that is not the triggering of that goal by means of an internal act, wherein a mechanism that founds a power line is employed, that satisfies certain conditionals such that a power must have been utilised, with due deference to the natural bond between feeling and power – and all in relation to what is definitively

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extra-bodily! I would like this to be an example of the way in which sheer description can resolve puzzlement. I think I would be prepared to describe this case as ‘an extension of the will beyond the body’. (θ) My arm is situated behind a screen so that I cannot see it. Suppose my hand has been amputated, though I do not realise that this is so: it still seems to be there, sometimes I say in all honesty that I am moving it, and so forth. At that point a metal hand with mechanisms exactly duplicating those of an ordinary hand is attached to my wrist. Or suppose the hand and forearm had been amputated and that this metal hand was suspended in mid-air. I am asked to move my index finger. Certain brain events then occur which transmit an electric ‘message’ to the nerve endings of my arm, this current is then transmitted across space to the copper wires in the metal hand, the mechanical muscle contracts and the metal finger moves! Now one shortcoming in this specification is, that I might think that my right hand was clenched when the mechanical hand was open, so that when I think I am opening my hand this might be accompanied by no more than a tensing of the already straightened metal fingers. But we might even be able to reproduce the postural ‘messages’ sent by the hand to the brain, so that when the mechanical hand is clenched, I should at that time think that my hand is clenched, and so on. Indeed, we might even import postural and other sensations. As we replace more and more features, the case grows stranger and more ordinary at the same time, and the initial puzzlement produced by this case begins after a time to diminish. We have in fact been travelling all the while in a circle! When we think we are moving farther and farther away from the ordinary case of the exertion of the will on the body, we find we are in fact very nearly back where we started. For we might even introduce our own nerves into this hand, in the place of those copper wires. And gradually we succeed in building up an ordinary hand. If now we persist in the statement: ‘We cannot extend the will beyond the body’, we seem to be doing little more than uttering a tautology, or making a trivial verbal recommendation about the use of the word ‘body’. This is the end point in the process of ‘building up the concept of a physical action’.

pa rt i i

The immediate object of the will I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels, Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator Laying my ghost in metal, The scales of this twin world tread on the double Dylan Thomas

Introduction

This work began with the topic of limitation. That was because first philosophical thoughts concerning the bodily will inevitably take the form of a spiritualisation of the phenomenon. In the first dawn of philosophical thought on this topic we tend to conceive of the will as a kind of magically potent longing or mental commanding that immediately and yet at a distance acts upon a body over which it presides in seignorial and arbitrary manner, limited it seems by nothing more than the falling of metaphysical dice! Then to raise the question of limits is to put such an elevated conception of willing in the dock. It is to query the supposed independence of the body: to consider the possible existence of necessary constraints that have their origin in the flesh. This led to an enterprise that was at once the analytical constituting of the bodily action and the assembling of a situation in which one performed a bona fide act of willing an extra-bodily phenomenon. In this way the will managed after all to break free of its bondage to the body. And yet such freedom proved to be a near illusion. For its new-found liberty was such that, far from finding the limitless domain of physical nature opening up before it, the novel objects of the will turned out to be mere body-substitutes. The body, as model and constraint, casts its shadow over all such libertarian ventures. Then in so far as the phenomenon and concept of bodily action have been pieced together in such a way as to permit a legitimate extension of the will beyond the body, this part of the enterprise is now concluded. But inasmuch as the criterial elements admit both of sharper delineation, analytical differentiation, and expansion it is not, and continues throughout Parts II and III. In speaking of the limits of the will I have been concerned to draw a divide between intelligible possible and impossible objects of the will. Then by contrast with mental willings, such as the evocation of mental imagery or the recovery of a memory, the bodily will is directed onto two objects. Thus, it has in the first place what might be called a primary target object or striking zone, and that is either a part of the body or a body-part substitute. 171

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But it has in the second place a goal event or phenomenal object, and this consists in the change that one seeks willingly to effect in the target object. In short, the will is directed onto an entity in which is to be generated some desired phenomenon. Then the desired change must be from some one determinate state of the target object to another, and that necessitates that both the object in which change is to be produced and something of the state of that object, must be epistemologically given to the subject if the will is to act. That is, bodily willing necessitates the givenness of the presence of, and something of the prevailing state of the object, from instant to instant, upon which it is brought to bear. In addition, this target object of the will has to be immediately given to one. For even though bodily willing may, as in skittles, have a succession of target areas in which to effect change, it always has of necessity one particular area that is at once bodily and the first and in some sense the immediate target area. Then it is with this entity – what might be called the point of application of the will – that I have all along been concerned. And we have just seen in Part I that a more precise characterisation of the point of application of the bodily will is, either a body-part or body-part substitute. Small wonder, if one thinks that the variety of willing involved – and there are but two kinds, viz. bodily and mental – is essentially directed to just such an object. Indeed, this has emerged as a criterial requirement of bodily action. That is, that in contrast with those toppling skittles, the very first target point of application of the bodily will is either body-part or body-part substitute. Then as we have just seen, it follows that this first target object and something of its mutating states must in some sense be ‘there’ for the agent in the first place before the will can strike. i epistemology Then at precisely this point in the discussion there occurs a shift in our fundamental theme – in an epistemological direction. Towards a rather neglected but, I believe, rich area: the epistemology of the body. It seems that if we are to make any further headway in elucidating the phenomenon of bodily willing, we must turn our attention onto this new topic. Now the mind-to-body problem has several strands, amongst which are (1) the problem of causal interaction, which concerns the fact that psychological events generate bodily events, (2) that of active interaction, concerning the will’s responsibility for certain bodily events, and (3) epistemological contact, which arises over the fact that we become aware of the body’s presence

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and a select few of its states in a special (‘body sense’) way. Now some of these problems are, and some are not, interdependent. Thus, (3) (epistemology) is generally irrelevant to (1) (interaction), for (say) fear and much else can cause bodily phenomena like pallor (etc.) irrespective of one’s awareness of the fact. However, we have just now seen that (3) (epistemology) is closely bound up with (2) (willing). For a necessary condition of the willing of a bodily event is that epistemological contact exists between the putative agent and his body: more exactly, a special immediate variety of epistemological contact. It seems that the body must be ‘there’ for one, more or less come what may and as it were through the thick and thin of the mind’s vicissitudes and in a specific immediate mode, if one is to be in a position to act. But a paradox seems to lurk in this suggestion. For surely we say that the will must have an immediate object for no other reason than that, like most mental phenomena, the will is a directed phenomenon. Yet this is puzzling. For if willing is as such directed, has it not got an internal object already? So why if it is to ‘strike’ should it need anything more than the presence of the limb object? In fact, the supposition that the limb has seemingly and immediately to be ‘there’, makes it appear as if the limb needed somehow to penetrate the mind as a psychological entity! Is not this something of a mess? The resolution of the problem is, I suggest, as follows. It is that the target area is immediately ‘there’, not because the will is essentially directed, but because it is essentially directed towards that of which one is putatively immediately aware!; and willing neither is nor encompasses awareness of any kind. That is, bodily willing necessitates the occurrence of the distinct psychological phenomenon, putative limb awareness, rather as does the visual experience necessitate the actual and not merely seeming presence of visual sensations! In either case one psychological phenomenon is the necessary ground of the other. To be sure, that is strange enough. It is a consequence of the fact that perception and the bodily will are the unique two concrete links between the inner and outer worlds: input and output points, where the mind regularly and in concrete mode interacts with its environment. In any case, there can be no doubt that bodily willing necessitates a putative awareness of its body object, and of a special (‘body sense’) kind. We can see that this is so if we consider a state in which, thanks to the temporary closure of all intuitional contact with the body and the consequent absence of the psychological ground of the bodily will, all seeming bodily willings cannot but be spurious in character. As dream visual experience is not visual experience, due to the non-existence of visual sensations in dreams,

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in similar manner dream bodily willings are not real willings, and this is because of the absence in dreams of the requisite putative immediate awareness of the body. Thus, bodily willing depends upon the obtaining of a special immediate epistemological relation between the subject and his body. It is in this way that the bodily will gets its object: an awareness making possible a willing. Then if we are more fully to comprehend this unusual epistemological relation, we must inspect it in some detail. This I do throughout Part II. But before I embark on that task in chapter 5, a few general comments on that relation. First, there is every reason for expecting it to be an unusual relation. For we are talking of the epistemological link between a man and in all probability himself qua material object!, and in any case the one object in the universe that is his own body. Is not that likely to be unusual? As Merleau-Ponty observed, this object is the only object around which it is not even in principle possible to take a stroll; the only object one cannot take one’s leave of or turn one’s back upon: the object of overwhelming importance and concern: a something to which one’s debt is limitless: the unique object whose existence and indeed whose mere state determines one’s presence in the world! The epistemology of this object must surely likewise be of a special order. ii ‘ body sense’ and the perception of space (1) What can we say at this point about such a special phenomenon? I believe that it is of fundamental importance to the animal condition, for the reason that it constitutes part of our original encounter with space. This is so in two respects. First because each of the five senses seems to depend upon this phenomenon, for in one way or another bodily awareness is involved, albeit sometimes as a silent and uninvited guest, yet always as a contributor and on its own terms, in the working of each of the five senses; but secondly and pre-eminently because this dependence is above all on the vital count of space. For body-sense is involved in most spatial perceivings, and in all oriented spatial perceivings. The dependence of the senses upon the spatial deliverances of body-sense is most openly evident in the case of the perception of space by tactual means. And this ought not to surprise us. For the sense of touch is the only one of the five senses that is an essential feature of animal existence, and since bodily awareness likewise is an essential of that condition, and bearing in mind that space is at once the content of these two modes of awareness and the a priori-given arena of our being, one might naturally expect a close

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and necessary relation between these two phenomena. In any case, it is so. Thus, it is clear that in tactile sense one’s awareness of the body is explicitly put to use, whether it be in the simple inactive instantaneous case of a mere sensation of contact, in which we come to learn of the presence and position of the contacting object, or in the more complex active perceptual processes whereby we discover the spatial character of objects. Consider the latter: here one actively and with some speed runs a bodily extremity like a hand around the outside of an object, and at the end of this procedure and somehow as a result of it makes the judgement, ‘It feels spherical’ (say). Indeed, one might in the dark crawl all over the outside of some object and at the end of the process make the judgement, ‘It seems to be a rhombus’ (though hardly, ‘It feels rhomboid’). Then a necessary condition of being able to have such experiences and make such judgements concerning the spatial properties of objects, is that one be capable of performing acts with one’s limbs or body as a whole wherein such spatial properties are manifest: say, move one’s right hand along a straight line or walk around a house. Then that in turn depends upon one’s being capable of receiving at least some measure of spatial data concerning one’s body. That is, upon ‘body sense’. This demonstrates how an awareness of the space of the body makes possible a tactile awareness of the space of material objects. It is a truth that is unaffected by two significant considerations. First, that the capacity to know of body space cannot precede the capacity to tactually determine the space of material objects, for how could one know that one’s hand was by one’s chin if one had no idea what it would be to tell it was by some object other than one’s body? Second, we could not use the space of our bodies as a way of discovering the space of material objects, if we did not know both the relation between our bodies and those objects and some of the more general ways of the world. This is evident if one remembers that circumambulation (assisted by sight) can be a method of discovering the spatial properties of (say) a house or hill, and that knowledge of the body’s relation to the object is a necessary element in this epistemological transaction. And it is exactly so also in the case of touch. We can see from the above discussion that a representational theory of perception must hold of tactile perception, with two important addenda: one is, that the representing medium is, not sensation and even less spatially arrayed sensation, but the instant-by-instant spatial properties of the body; the other addendum is, that a knowledge of body space is useless in the absence of knowledge of the spatial relation of the body to the perceived object – as we noted above. Then bearing in mind that ‘body sense’ and ‘tactile sense’ are necessary elements of the animal condition, and that

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they cannot discharge their cognitive function in the absence of a measure of knowledge of the physical world, it seems to me that the existence of an environment and its most general traits can be no kind of empirical discovery. And it strongly suggests – since the procedure in question vividly displays the interdependence of knowledge of the body and the world – that circumambulation that is assisted by tactile sense may well be the most philosophically illuminating of all sense-perceptual epistemological procedures. In any case, it is certain that awareness of body space plays a necessary part in the vitally important perception of physical space by tactual means. Body sense, tactile sense, and the physical environment, are the fundamental epistemological givens of animality. (2) Meanwhile, the more silent but continuous presence of the body in the spatial perceivings of sight and hearing, shows primarily in the element of orientation. Take the case of sight. Thus, I open my eyes and report that the tree is to the right of the house. Yet were I to be suspended upside down like a bat, I would instead report that the tree was up above me and to the left of the house. We can see here how the nature of our visual experience depends upon the orientation of the body. Then what sort of visual experiences could one have if orientation was absent? Indeed, could one have visual experiences of any kind? Well, while it would certainly be odd, it is not obviously impossible. It would need to be a visual perceiving in which one’s attitude to the orientation of a Rembrandt self-portrait was as mine is to the orientation of the works of Mark Rothko, viz. near indifference. Moreover, it would have to be such that one would have no idea which hand to move where if asked to insert a hand into one’s visual field at the point occupied by some light. That seems strange enough. And yet it is clear that various forms of seeings are in principle possible: seeings by electrons rather than light; a rudimentary seeing in which colour patches correlate as do smells with nearby specific stuffs; seeing in which the mediating phenomenon is no more spatially organised than are sounds in hearing – so that the objects of sight would get no farther than the visual mediator, viz. light; and so on. Then orientationless seeing might be yet another variety. The following conjecture at least suggests that it might be so. Thus, it may be that the colour sensations of the permanently blind could be singled out and named for them, that they could be taught to discriminate simple sensuous shapes such as triangles with angles 90◦ 60◦ 30◦ , and all in the absence of orientation – which suggests that orientationless visual perception might be a real possibility – for if this could happen with the blind it could happen with the sighted. Perhaps this is possible. And then again, perhaps not. But

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in any case, such a seeing cannot but acquire orientation if it is integrated with bodily action; and in any case, all examples of actual seeing are oriented and determined by the orientation of the body of the perceiver. So much for the sense of sight. What of hearing? Here the body makes its presence especially felt in those auditory experiences that depend upon awareness of one’s orientation, and these are generally directional in character: for example, when one makes such reports as ‘I hear that sound X is over to the right’ or ‘I hear that sound X is to the right of sound Y.’ In sum, awareness of the body enters in one way or another into all oriented spatially informative perceivings, while in the case of the vitally important sense of touch, where a spatial representational theory applies, an actual spatial match exists between the space of the perceived object and that of the body movements of which one is aware, whether it be of limbs relative to body or body relative to object: each in their different way depending in the final analysis upon an immediate awareness of limb configuration together with a knowledge of the spatial relation between body and object. iii sense-perception and regress If the above account is correct and all five senses depend for their spatial content upon body-sense, upon what does body-sense depend? Apparently, upon nothing. Then this suggests that, were we to interpret such (‘body sense’) awareness of the body as a mode of sense-perception, a regress would be generated. But this would be wrong. What rather leads to regress is, the supposition that the awareness of the body is a sense-perceptual phenomenon of the same kind as ‘the five senses’. For example, regress would be generated if the chosen model of sense-perception were sight. For if awareness of body space is to make its usual contribution to our awareness of the world, then it must determine orientation in the visual mode of awareness, seeing that it is through sight (and touch) that one knows such facts as (say) that ‘this large object is to my right’. Accordingly, if sight were the model for body awareness and bodily awareness lacked orientation, body awareness could not play its standard role of orienting our awareness of the world; while if sight was the model and bodily awareness possessed orientation, then the orientation of that experience of the body must in turn derive from experience of the body, which is certainly regressive. Thus, as the chain of reasons must come to an end, so with spatial awareness; and since it cannot come in a detached network of bodily sensation, the very last spatial datum looks as if it must be bodily pure and simple.

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In sum, the peculiarly intimate epistemological relation of an animal to its body is an unseen but vital determinant of all the five varieties of sense-perception, and cannot therefore on pain of regress be an example of that usual kind. And yet it is perceptual in character, albeit recessively so, for it engages the attention and does so in concrete mode. In addition, since it depends upon the occurrence of feeling in one’s limbs, it must be classed as sense-perceptual in type, even though sensation plays a structurally different role here than it does with the other senses. Moreover, in a specific sense of the term it is an immediate perception as the others are not. And so one supposes that this epistemological relation of animal to body must be an irrelative and altogether more primitive relation than that of the other varieties of sense-perception. Then this special primitive mode of awareness must be the way the bodily will finds its point of application. That is, it must be the way it gets its target, its bodily target, its bodily immediate target object.

chapter 5

The given

1. introduction Let us call the simplest unreflective conception of physical action ‘Unreflective Physical Realism’. I take this to consist in the belief that physical actions are nothing but bodily movements (pressures, etc.) that have a certain requisite source within the organism. Then philosophy begins with the insight that the realm of the psychological must find representation in this picture, and this idea finds its most natural yet distorted expression in the theory which I called ‘Magical Volitionism’: the theory that some bodily event φ is willed iff an interior mental act of the will immediately and inexplicably generates that φ. All this was examined in Part I, where I engaged in the piecemeal procedure of constituting the concept of physical action out of its parts. This led to a correction of Magical Volitionism, for I found it necessary to give due recognition to the part played by mechanism in physical action. Then even though an act-mechanism is a physical state, it brings with it an enhancement of the role allotted to the psychological in any fully assembled picture of physical action. For act-mechanisms are such that certain conditionals, cast in psychological terms, have application to the agent. For example: ‘Decides-he-at-instant-t-to-stop-willed-phenomenon-φ-at-t ⊃ stops φ at t’, ‘Decides-he-at-t-to-speed-up-willed-phenomenon-φ-at-t ⊃ speeds up φ at t.’ Indeed, apart from the recognition of the essential role played by mechanism, all that has come to light in constituting the physical act has enriched the interior picture, and added to our awareness of the distinctive psychological relation that holds between a man and any bodily phenomenon φ that he wills. Now perhaps the very first thing to be said about that relation is, that it is decidedly multi-faceted. I have in mind the following. It emerged in Part I that (1) the origins of such a willed φ lay not merely within the organism, which holds after all of the movements of amoebas, but within the mind of the organism; (2) acting along a mechanism that was nomically responsive 179

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to here-and-now decision. A mental origin (3) which included an intention and act-desire. I noted further (4) that the subject had some form of jurisdiction over those mental phenomena (without actually willing them). (5) And that he knew that a φ phenomenon that was firmly intended for here-and-now was going to happen. (6) A knowledge that was immediate (in one sense of that protean term). (7) And, while the bodily mechanism may fail and φ not occur, the absence of surprise at φ, a product of its intention origin, is in a sense even more total than (say) what we experience when the sun rises at its appointed hour. For (8) our relation to willed φ is most unlike that either to unwilled φ or a φ willed by another. Thus, it is not that of observer: not because we do not perceive φ (for we often do); not because we expect it (for we relate as observer to the rising sun); not because φ may be part of a psychological event (for we can relate as observer to our own toothaches); but because φ gives expression to a psychological phenomenon that is essentially directed to the future, viz. an intention. We have already come a long way from Unreflective Physical Realism. Now apart from acknowledging the due importance of mechanism, and rejecting the extreme forms of Volitionism, all insights have enriched the picture of the inner life of physical action. This situation continues throughout the present part II. For in chapters 5 to 8 it will emerge that the agent must stand in a further distinctive psychological relation to φ that is willed. Then while the special psychological relations already indicated are for the most part cognitive relations, this novel relation concerns the agent’s mode of awareness of φ. 2 . the conditions of act ion (a) The importance of ‘feeling’ Let me express the above in summary fashion. In Part I, in assembling the elements of the concept of a physical action, I encountered the following constituent parts in the case of a basic physical act  of willing bodily event φ. That one ‘just knew’ of φ that it was coming, in a particular use of ‘just know’; that φ owed its existence to mental phenomena; via the activation of a motor-mechanism; which entailed that φ’s occurrence exemplified a law-like conditional and manifested a power; and that the item in which φ was generated was a physical object in which one had ‘feeling’. Now I have had much to say concerning these several constituents – except for the last. It is to this that I now address myself. This feature will add to the picture of the inner life of an agent who wills some physical phenomenon φ.

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Let us begin this discussion by recalling the central question of Part I. ‘Why cannot we will the movement of extra-bodily objects?’ I was inclined to offer the following reply: it is because the object is not part of one. Then the content of this answer proved to be resoluble into three separate explanatory propositions: that no act-mechanism links brain and object; that there exists no material basis for a special cognitive relation with the object; and that no neurological system connects brain and object such that one has feeling in that object. We have seen the importance of the first two factors, but as yet the special significance of feeling remains unexplained. Why is this factor of any importance at all in the occurrence of physical action? What can be its role in the genesis of φ? Might it be that feeling helps to make possible the special cognitive relation that holds between the subject and intentionally willed φ? I do not think so. I think it is because the φ one wills and hence also the limb in which that φ occurs must in a special sense be ‘immediately present’ to the willing subject, and feeling helps to make this possible. (b) ‘Immediate presence’ (1) I suggest, then, that a necessary condition, though not a sufficient, of willing a phenomenon φ in a limb L is, that in some sense of the expression, both φ and L be ‘immediately present’ to one. Then what can we mean when in this sense we say of a material object that it is ‘immediately present’? It cannot be to say that it is part of one. For in the first place one would not say of one’s kidneys that they were ‘immediately present’. While in the second place we may well say that the prosthetic hand described at the end of Part I was ‘immediately present’, even though prosthetic hands have hardly any more right to be stipulated part of one than do one’s wig or denture. Thus, it is scarcely necessary and certainly not sufficient for ‘immediate presence’ that the item be part of one. Again, it cannot be to say of the item that one has active power over it and hence that it is linked to one’s brain via an act-mechanism – even though that may be a necessary condition of such action. For a woman’s breasts are ‘immediately present’ to her and yet she lacks the power immediately to move them relative to her body. Thus, while it is perhaps a sufficient condition of ‘immediate presence’ that one has active power over the part, it cannot be a necessary condition. Again, it cannot be to say, either that one has immediate knowledge of the present existence and spatial properties of the item, or even that one has such immediate knowledge and the item is part of one. After all, an

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‘intuitive’ might have immediate knowledge of the weather, without our wishing to claim that the weather was in the sense in question ‘immediately present’ to him. And why should not a man have an immediate knowledge of the state of his kidneys without relating to them in the way we relate to much of the surface of our own bodies? (2) The following are some of the properties of the relation holding between oneself and those objects that in the sense in question are ‘immediately present’ to one. The object is part of one, though strictly speaking need not be; and one may have active power over it, though need not have. Much more to the point is: one has feeling in it. And knows of its present presence. And of some of its spatial properties. And knows through a relation of awareness-of. A relation which is attentively immediate. And sensuous. And concrete, and intuitional. And the part is for one a differentiated part of the totality, one’s body. And over and above these properties, the following somewhat puzzling property also obtains. Namely: the relation in question holds independently of the distribution and objects of the subject’s attention. A man sitting at the cinema, absorbed in fascinating phenomena occurring on the screen, still stands in this special relation to the foot that he is tapping to the thudding music. Again, a man who stirs in his sleep, or one who idly scratches his neck as he reads, stand in this relation to these bodily parts. Then does knowledge obtain in such circumstances? Brain damage could induce error, so why not brain health knowledge? A person who completely unawares moves his tongue in his mouth is one who knows the position of, without consciously noticing the position of, this limb of which he is assuredly aware. This knowledge is such as to leave no residue in the memory, and has no need of concepts if it is to exist. It precedes, and will outlive if need be, the acquisition of concepts. It is therefore a relation that can hold in subliminal pre-conceptual situations, e.g. in a newly born infant that is making sucking movements as it sleeps. Clearly, a very primitive relation. Not surprisingly – if one thinks what it relates! Nevertheless, the relation in question can be brought into full consciousness: say, when the subject of a psychological experiment reports on the posture of one of his limbs. In sum: the subject is immediately, and concretely, and intuitionally, and sensuously, aware of a differentiated part of a mapped body totality; and this relation holds independently of the possession of a concept-system; and independently of the distribution and present contents of one’s attention. I shall complete the characterisation of this property by offering a simple definition by example. Thus, this is how a man relates to his legs, a woman

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to her breasts, an amputee to his prosthetic workable hand; but it is not how these people relate to their kidneys or brain or hair or clothes or furniture. Such a relation seems to be a necessary condition of willing some phenomenon φ in an object. (3) It seems to me from the above that the property we are calling ‘immediate presence’ must be intimately linked to, dependent upon, and distinguished from another related property: that of being there-and-then proprioceptively perceivable. A consideration of the sense of sight sheds light on this distinction, for there is a visual property which is closely akin to the latter property. Let me first describe the visual situation. Thus, we possess visual fields, and are attentively aware of the visible totality which fills them. In fact, in humans this latter is a natural psychological necessity. More, humans are such that when conscious they are more or less incapable, not merely of not noticing some of the visibilia before them, but of not actively attending to or looking at them: we more or less cannot not look at some of the visibilia in our field of view. This near compulsion no more compromises our freedom than does the compulsion to think. It is not that we are obliged to voyeuristically ‘gape’; rather is it that our obligation to be oriented to the world has in part to utilise the visual channel. Then the property of sight which finds an analogue in ‘body sense’ is as follows. It is that each occupant of the visual field is there-and-then visible to one: it is before one’s consciousness, whether or not accepted by it; and it is in addition a visible part of a visual totality that is of necessity visually perceived. This is an analogue of proprioceptive perceivability. The proprioceptive situation is interestingly similar, and significantly dissimilar. It is similar in that our limbs are at any moment, not necessarily proprioceptively perceived, but there-and-then proprioceptively perceptible. And it is noteworthily similar in that, like the occupants of the visual field, they are perceptible parts of a totality that more or less necessarily is perceived. For there is no ‘shaking off’ one’s body in one’s awareness, any more than when awake we can ‘shake off’ awareness of the there-andthen visible totality before our eyes. So much for the ‘noteworthy similarity’ holding between the visible and the proprioceptively perceivable. The noteworthy dissimilarities are at least two in number. The first is, that whereas the visibility of any item is attentively mediated by the visibility of the light and of the visual sensations it causes, the proprioceptive perceptibility of our limbs is attentively mediated by nothing (even though causally mediated by bodily sensation). The second even more noteworthy dissimilarity was noted by J.-P. Sartre when he characterised the body as

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‘the transcended’. The property which I assume he had in mind is that of attentive recessiveness: more exactly, an attentive recessiveness that is a consequence of the fact that proprioception normally plays the role of enabling us physically and actively to engage with the environment. Thus, proprioceptive perception is a naturally recessive enabler of engagement with the environment. In sum, being ‘immediately present’ is being there-and-then proprioceptively perceived, and this property contingently brings with it the properties of being part of a necessarily noticed totality that attentively recessively enables the attention to flow out onto the World. (c) The ‘immediate presence’ of the willed does not derive from the immediate self-awareness of the self-conscious agent Why is ‘immediate presence’ necessary for physical action? In general, action is the willing production of phenomena in oneself. Then might it be the case that, because action is the production of phenomena in oneself, and the self is immediately given to the self, that the willed change must be ‘immediately present’ to the self? That is, does the ‘immediate presence’ of willed bodily phenomena derive in the final analysis from the immediate givenness of the self to the self-conscious subject? A preliminary question. How does immediate givenness of one’s self relate to immediate presence to one of one’s body? I think it is clear that they are absolutely distinct. Thus, a wakeful and sometimes also a dreaming self-conscious being will, but a deeply refrigerated being will not, know of his present existence. Then this knowledge, which is absolutely immediate, but whose content cannot be the content of a discovery experience, owes its existence neither to knowledge nor awareness of one’s body. It is a formal cognitive consequence of the type of consciousness that obtains. And yet awareness of one’s body is a real phenomenon, and sharply to be distinguished from knowledge of the present existence of one’s body. This can be shown by a thought-experiment. Thus, all one’s nerves may temporarily be disengaged so that not only do one’s legs not seem to be there, not only do one’s face and brain not seem to be there, not only is it true of every part of one’s body that it is false that it seems to be there, one’s very body does not seem to be there! And might of a sudden, as all the nerves are simultaneously reactivated, do so once again; so that ‘my body seems to be there’ must describe a real experience. Nonetheless, when one’s body did not seem to be there, one knew both that one’s body and oneself continued to exist. Therefore, whereas awareness of one’s existence must be a merely continuous knowledge of one’s present existence,

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a continuous mutating cognitive state, awareness of one’s body must be an experienced seeming that is not knowledge of one’s body and that is distinct both from the phenomenon of self-conscious consciousness and the knowledge of one’s present existence that it ensures. Therefore one can know one now exists, and yet know and yet be unaware of; or know and also be aware of; and even neither know nor be aware of one’s body or limbs. In short, the immediate givenness of the agent to the agent cannot be the ‘immediate presence’ of his body to him. But the givenness of the self to the self, not being the ‘immediate presence’ of the material body to the self, is not the immediate givenness of some immaterial something to the self, e.g. a Transcendental Ego. Indeed, it is paradoxically the givenness to the self of that of which the material parts of the body are likewise material parts, viz. the material entity that is oneself. It follows that the object of physical action – which is ‘immediately present to one’ – is a something that is at once part of what is experientially ‘immediately present’ to one (viz. one’s body) and part of what is non-experientially and merely cognitively and absolutely immediately given to one (viz. oneself ). Thus, the experienced seeming-to-be-there of one totality is not the cognitive seeming-to-be-there of a different totality of the identical parts! And yet one naturally feels that, since these parts are parts of oneself, then the coming-to-one of that which they totalise (viz. oneself ) should at least be non-distinct from the coming-to-one of the other item that they totalise (viz. one’s body). But it is not so. Thus, the limb’s seeming to be there is the seeming to be there of that which when synthesised with all the others of its type helps constitute both oneself and one’s body; and the self’s givenness to the self is different in kind from the givenness of the body and the will’s bodily objects. We cannot therefore argue that, since (i) all action is the generation of phenomena in oneself, and (ii) the self is immediately given to the self, therefore (iii) the part of oneself in which willed phenomena occurs must likewise be immediately given to the self. (d) Then why should the bodily part be ‘immediately present’? (i) Bearing in mind the failure of the explanation offered above, seeing that the cognitive givenness of the self to the self is not constituted out of the experienced givenness of the self’s parts to the self, why should the limb and its willed movement φ be ‘immediately present’? It cannot be because φ is psychological in type; for φ, which perhaps occurs a yard from the brain, is not a psychological event. Then why should there exist this special

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yet fallible concrete intuitional sensuous attentively recessive (i.e. normally marginal in awareness) pre-conceptual (i.e. surviving failure to be subsumed under concepts) relation to the body parts and the φ that we will in them? (2) One naturally feels that it must be connected with the need to know of the phenomena that we will. For do we not require ‘feed-back’ as we act? Do we not adjust our willings to epistemological ‘readings’? And must not this knowledge rest upon an awareness of some kind? But a difficulty arises when we remember the special relation to the willed event that emerged in Part I. Thus, we there suggested, not merely that the agent immediately knows of φ when it happens, but because φ gives expression to an intention generally knows of φ before it happens, so that, as Wittgenstein claimed, he will experience absence of surprise at φ in the strongest degree. But if he knew of φ immediately beforehand, what need of immediate awareness of φ at the time? So how to explicate the special awareness relation to willed φ by drawing attention to the need for cognitive contact with φ? This difficulty is illusory. For while a man may know his arm will now rise because he knows he firmly intends raising it, it is absurd to suggest that usually ‘he knows his arm is now rising because he knows he did and still intends moving it’. That is, absurd to locate the origin of his present knowledge in the causally operative intention state. In short, it is clear that, while intendings entail believings, both in the present and future, now-intending-φ cannot be the explanation of one’s now-believing-φ-ishappening. This belief must contact the world directly at some point, concretely and intuitionally. Accordingly, we can dismiss the difficulty raised by the causal properties of the intention. And it is certain that a man for the most part needs to know of bodily φ that he is willing. And know not as a result of firmly intending φ-making, but altogether irrespective of whether φ gave expression to an intention, and in any case directly as a result of φ itself. And that seems to allow a significant causal role for an awareness of φ. Yet it is still unclear why knowledge of φ should rest upon the very special awareness relation that I earlier delineated. Why must this knowledge derive from ‘immediate presence’? Why precisely should knowings concerning present φ derive from an awareness-of that is concrete, intuitional, sensuous, and, if need be, subattentive and pre-conceptual? Above all, it is unclear why we must relate thus immediately to the will’s objects. (3) At best I can offer an almost circular answer to this question. Thus, the will, like perception and unlike desire and other more or less purely

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thought-mediated psychological phenomena, relates us to phenomena in the concrete and here-and-now. Then how can bodily willing have a psychologically given object if the thought does not establish this connection? What options remain? It seems that the only way in which a here-and-now body-object can be psychologically given for a bodily willing, is through a variety of perception: that of ‘immediate presence’. A primitive variety – for a primitive phenomenon! However, this account fails to meet one very important difficulty. Even if bodily willing has to be directed to an object which is given in concrete, intuitional, sensuous mode, why must it take the form of proprioceptive perceivability? Now the answer to this question must depend upon the meaning of‘proprioception’. Then whereas the four sensuous senses – sight, hearing, smell, and taste – are definable in terms of their secondary quality, the essential senses – proprioception and touch – are not. No secondary quality is the necessary mediator in their case: for example, the sensation of heat does not and could not play that role. Accordingly, it may be that we can constitutively assemble the concept of proprioception out of the above set of properties – in which case the question would find its answer. But I shall not pursue this difficult question. 3. k inaesthetic and postural sensat ions Let me try to say a little more about this relation, holding between a man and his limbs, of ‘immediate presence’. The first thing to note is: it is manifest not merely in active movings, for it holds when one is aware of arm movement that is effected by a force other than one’s will. Again, even though the epistemological relation between subject and limb is attentively immediate, it is different from the even more intimate epistemological relation that holds between a man and the experienced contents of his mind. In certain experimental situations nothing is easier to suppose than that one is the subject of gross illusions concerning limb presence and posture, and this can hardly be said of pains or thoughts or emotions. Thus, it is not the special preserve of action; nor is it the familiar immediate mentalistic epistemological relation; and it is at once fallible and immediate. Most important, the relation is in some way sensuous, for it is clear that the bodily feelings present in a man’s arm have a part to play in his being aware both of the arm and movement in that arm. In sum: a fallibly immediate seemingto-be-there that is somehow or other based upon feeling in the limb. Then the problem arises: what exact role does feeling play in the genesis of this peculiar relation? May it not so intervene that the immediacy of

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this relation, as is the case with a phenomenon like (say) a ‘hunch’ and as opposed to the powerful immediacy of the cogito, is something short of absolute immediacy? For may not feeling be functioning here as evidence of the bodily state? Indeed, may it not be that a sensuous entity interposes between subject and limb, in and through which one becomes aware both of the limb and of its posture and movements? After all, in the case of the sense of sight a continuous field of visual sensations is precisely just such a mediatorial entity, so why not here? A sensuous entity that is disclosed in the nude, so to say, in the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’? These are the questions that will now occupy me. But before I begin, a stipulation. This concerns the expression, ‘the given’. Now ‘givens’ are traditionally taken to exist in relation to domains of being, such as the past, other minds, causation, and to vary with time and person, being relative to epistemological standpoint. And they are frequently understood to consist in the contents of all those knowings that ground knowledge concerning the domain in question through the offices of the relation, being-a-reason-for. However, because much of our knowledge commences in experience rather than knowledge, it is equally natural stipulatively to interpret ‘the given’ in terms of experience and to limit its subject-matter to the presently experienced through which we gain experiential access to some domain of being. For example, the perceptual attention passes onto physical items through the experiential mediation of other items which intervene between us and its object like so many veils; and it is natural to wish to discover which is the very first veil of all. Such a mediatorial phenomenon is an equally natural candidate for the title ‘given’. This stipulation would construe ‘the given’ as consisting of all those items of which one is absolutely immediately aware, which are such that through them we come to be aware of all that is presently experienced in the domain under consideration. One example of this type of ‘given’ would be the visual sense-datum. Then this is the stipulation that I adopt as I embark upon a discussion of ‘the given’ – for an animal – in the present – in relation to its own body. (a) The evidential situation (1) Let me at this point attempt to lay bare the absolutely native ungarnished epistemological facts in this region of being. Thus, let us suppose that in an experimental situation, and with my eyes blindfolded, one of my arms is moved. I report: ‘My arm is moving.’ How did I know? Well, it would be entirely natural to say that ‘It felt as if it were moving.’ Then when I

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said that ‘my arm is moving’ did I base that claim on the fact that certain feelings were present in my arm? And the further claim that ‘my arm is moving upwards’ on the fact that those feelings possessed certain relevant qualities? Then if these feelings – call them ‘feelings of movement’ or ‘kinaesthetic sensations’ – play such a role, why should not an experimental scientist duplicate them in a stationary arm and generate an illusion of arm movement? And yet something about this suggestion sounds a trifle odd. What can it be? We shall see that its origins run deep. We are considering whether the only epistemological link between oneself and the relevant bodily spatial facts are the feelings we experience. We wish to know if we arrive at such knowledge along this particular route. We wish to discover whether it is a relation wherein the attention passes through a mediating veil of sensations onto its object – as it does in visual senseperception. Is it a relation in which the ‘given’ is purely sensuous? Can that be how it is? Just oneself and certain feelings? Can that be all? Well, what else is there? What more does one come across if one introspects? (2) Now in speaking in this way we run the risk of refining the word ‘feeling’ out of existence, of draining the term of all significance. That is, in attempting to lay bare the basic epistemological data and allot to feelings their proper epistemological function, we may in the end deform the very concept through asking the phenomenon to play an extreme evidential role that is conceptually not open to it. For it is hard to know where to stop in this radical refining procedure. And possibly we will go too far. At the same time we cannot let that stand in the way. For we are searching for the absolute foundation of our epistemological relation to our bodies. And in doing so we must strip feeling of all secondary accoutrements. Precisely because they are secondary. Yet there is something suspect in speaking of ‘tending to refine the word “feeling”’ – a style of expression that is forced upon one by an over-zealous search for basic evidence. It suggests that there might exist alternative usages of the word. That is, that there might exist learnable uses of some word ‘Z’ (say) in some other language, coined to designate precisely what we at present call ‘feeling’, even though the primitive or criterial evidence for Z’s that is communicated in teaching ‘Z’ is not what we use for ‘feeling’. As two words in two languages might designate one disease, measles, from diverse historical and evidential backgrounds, measles manifesting its presence differently in different races and speakers, so it might be claimed could two words comparably designate the one phenomenon, feeling. Indeed, something analogous might even be postulated as a possibility over a time span

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within the one language: a developmental history of the word ‘feeling’! Thus, as ‘gold’ must have developed a richer usage over three or four millennia, as people gathered new facts and devised more fundamental tests for its presence, might not a word like ‘pain’ develop in this way? Might our concept of pain have had such a history? Well, one very much doubts it. And yet in the case of an internal phenomenon like pain, one can find oneself thinking in this way. For we can readily suppose that we begin with the basic relation of designation; and subsequently contrive to add to this bedrock core element of the usage all manner of additional inessentials. For some of the rules for the use of a word like ‘pain’ do not appear to have all that much to do with what the word stands for. Thus, the pain itself seems somehow simple, featureless, self-contained, and therefore strictly to be designatable independently of its connection with other items. Then may it not be that one could learn the use of the word ‘pain’ without learning of these links? And so one suspects that the fundamental relation of designation has taken aboard more luggage than it needs. Yet strangely enough we simultaneously accept that complex facts about the use of the word ‘pain’ are essential elements of the machinery for designating this item. As Wittgenstein remarked: ‘What we mean by “He sees red” seems simple enough, how we discover that he does is very complicated.’ Take an example: that pain cannot exist unless someone exists to have it. This is a logically necessary truth, and must be accepted by anyone who correctly uses ‘pain’ to designate pain. And yet if you have an actual pain, and scrutinise it, there is nothing one comes across that is directly indicative of this necessity. For it is not as if you could discern the face of man or of oneself in it. (A sensuous mirror image, a ‘man in the moon’.) Somehow the pain appears to have nothing to do with anything else. In itself it seems perfectly detached and all but featureless. Thus, we may come to feel that certain basic element of the use of a word may, without interfering with the word’s capacity to designate what it does, be deleted from the usage. We may think of this as a purifying process which takes us nearer to the basic epistemological given, to what pre-interpretatively really happens. Such thinking underlies the idea that we relate evidentially to our limbs solely through the mediation of feeling. In this way the search for basic sensuous basic data has a tendency to go hand with the supposition that psychological terms designate their designatum independently of its connections with other phenomena and in particular with behavioural or causal verificationist phenomena. That is, with an endorsement of the concept of – in the Wittgensteinian sense – a ‘private language’. Yet in actual fact we are in grave danger of detaching the psychological item from all

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other items in the psychological network. That is, from the very framework that enables it to exist. (3) Let me explain. Learning the use of ‘pain’ involves learning many facts: that no pain can exist without an owner, that a pain that one person has cannot be had by another, that pain has a determinate intensity of which its owner is apprised, that it is undesirable, that it tends in humans to cause agitation – and perhaps also that it has a position in the body of which its owner must be aware. Yet pain itself, like colour, seems somehow simple. Then in asserting, as I did in (2) (above), that the suggestion that we rely completely on feeling for knowledge of limb posture (etc.) runs the risk of ‘draining the word of significance’, and taking pain as a case in point, I meant the following: that its qualitative and structural simplicity may delude us into denying it its genuinely complex character, viz. as undesirable, of determinate intensity, at somewhere, in someone, only. We may come to think of it as a sort of ‘bare particular’, as a something endowed with nothing more than a quale. We may find ourselves bemused by the idea of the ‘essential simplicity of pain’, and suppose that the word bluntly designates pain independently of these seemingly contingent additions to the usage. For we suppose we could have and know of the sensation, without knowing where it is, and then, through something about the sensation, come via evidential considerations to know its position in space and the position in space of the limb that harbours it. This looks dangerously close to supposing that one could learn the sense and use of ‘pain’ independently of and prior to learning anything more about pains than that they feel as they feel! That we might know that ‘pain’ stands for ‘that X’ without knowing of the X that it must have an owner, me, an intensity, position, of which I am apprised, etc.! In short, radical evidentialism about one’s body and its sensations may be a symptom of misunderstanding what it is to learn the sense and use of a word. In particular, the type of misunderstanding described at length by Wittgenstein in his discussion of ‘private objects’. As noted above, it threatens to disengage feeling from its position in the holistic psychological network that is in fact pre-eminently supportive of its being. (4) Thus, the radical evidentialist suggestion is that the epistemological link between oneself and one’s body is feeling. And the specific claim is that we depend completely upon feeling for any information that we acquire about the present spatial properties of the body-thing. No more. The original givens are: oneself, feelings with quales, and that is all! Perhaps the

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following is an accurate model for this theory: we are inside a dark hollow sphere set rolling in a land where gravity does not exist: the sphere gets all sorts of bumps and jolts and so do we: it moves in all sorts of ways and so do we. That is, location and orientation, unlike feeling itself, are no part of the original epistemological data in relation to the body-thing – space a complete absentee! All that is originally given is: feeling, feeling, feeling! How likely is this? Are we not even given that a sensation is set in the body part in which it is? Well, assuming we know that a feeling we have is a feeling in the foot, how is it that we know this? Could it be that we find out by inspecting the feeling? Is it conveyed through quale? Yet nothing about the feeling seems to say that it is in the foot. Then how else? Might it be that we come to know through discovering that a point on the foot is the point in space occupied by our finger when we move it along the skin until it ‘encounters’ the feeling? But this might seem unacceptable. For we might be inclined to say that, inasmuch as ‘I have a pain but no idea where it is’ seems all but unintelligible, it must be a near necessity that a person be able at least crudely to locate his feelings without needing to engage in such procedures. And yet why should it be so? Perhaps we can dispense with this ‘rule’. In any case, radical evidentialism believes that we can; for it supposes that evidential, and hence contingent and therefore ‘non-grammatical’ considerations, lead to our locating sensations where we do. Then it is clear from this discussion that several very different positions can be adopted on this issue. How to break the deadlock between them? Well, let us at this point return to the very beginning. Let us look for first principles. And let us in doing so consider these several theoretical positions, in diminishing order of ‘radicality’. (b) Kinaesthetic sensations (1) As Descartes in relation to the world, so we in relation to the subject’s own body. In either case a philosopher is searching for the ultimate foundation of knowledge in a particular domain. Now I think we would all accept that, in the normal course of events, if a man has a pain in his foot then he must know he has: we naturally assume that its location is part of the original datum. Meanwhile, radical evidentialism, believing that we assume too much, supposes that the original datum is decidedly less and is in fact purely and completely sensuous. How shall we go about settling this difference between these theories? Well, let us temporarily side with radical evidentialism and draw out the consequences of this theory. That is, let us as a Cartesian-ish thought-experiment temporarily dispense with the supposed

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rule that body-spatial information is equi-original with the sensation and see what follows. Thus, we now assume that the feelings in an arm must be the sensuous evidence through which we come to know of arm posture and arm movement. Accordingly, I shall call those feelings ‘postural sensations’ and ‘kinaesthetic sensations’. However the above statement of the theory is consistent with at least two interpretations, depending upon how seriously we take the suggestion that those feelings are the ground of our knowledge of the body. In short, just how much is meant by ‘kinaesthetic sensations’? Precisely what do we build into the notion of a ‘postural sensation’? Do we (most radically) (α) mean: certain feelings we have, and these feelings only occur in the right arm, so the right arm must be present; and of this class of feeling these are the kind corresponding to arm movement, so the right arm must be moving; and of that sub-class these are the kind corresponding to such and such movement, so the right arm must be moving in that manner? Or do we (less radically) (β) mean: certain feelings we have, not necessarily of a kind corresponding to the right arm; and these feelings are situated in space; and since their position is roughly the same as that occupied by the right arm we may say of them literally that they are ‘in the arm’? This second theory puts forward a less radical analysis of ‘the feelings are in the right arm’. For it assumes that a feeling’s position in physical space is amongst the raw uninterpreted data given to the subject: that the uninterpreted experience of feeling is of located feeling! Now it is difficult to dismiss this idea. Somehow it seems closer to the truth than the most radical theory. Intuitively it seems that the original datum is, not just feeling, but feelingat-a-place. After all, can one really convince oneself that a toothache comes in itself as nowhere? Can one seriously believe in quales corresponding to each limb? Thus, it is beginning to look as if the Cartesian-inspired search for a pure feeling ground of body awareness may be doomed from the start. We may have to recognise that the raw uninterpreted data are richer than we supposed. That the pain that is designated by ‘pain’ is a something that is from the start given to its owner as standing in certain relations to other things. Gradually we may be forced to replace some of the features – such as the feeling’s position in space – that were provisionally dispensed with in the thought-experiment. So I shall move on from the first most radical theory (α). Provisionally, the way lies open for acceptance of the second less radical theory (β). (2) Let me at this point show how one might naturally come by this second theory (β). Now we have already had recourse to naive experiment in an

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attempt to recapture ‘evidential innocence’, the epistemological ‘state of nature’ concerning our own bodies. But let us do so once again. Thus, look up at the ceiling while your right arm is moved to the right. Attempt to recapture the original uninterpreted experience. Try to undo the lessons of time! Then somehow one cannot shake off the belief that the arm has gone to the right. Well, try again. Hard. Attempt to transfer all attention away from the limb and onto the feelings. Scrutinise them. Now tell us about them. Then you cannot in doing so help mentioning that they are in your arm, which is over to the right, poised like such and such, near to such and such a part of the body. But this is more than was asked for! This is not ‘sheer data’! Then purge the epistemological situation of these extraneous factors. Attend again . . . (And so on). As this philosophical propaganda continues, the more pliable subject might find himself persuaded that he has at last succeeded in jettisoning the conviction that his arm is in such and such a position. He believes that he now entertains no more than conjectural views as to its location. That all that engages his mind is – feelings. Yet if he were then asked – his eyes still directed onto the ceiling – to say to which side of his body those feelings are located – and if the penalty for error were sudden death, who can doubt that he would point to the right? Indeed, if the truth be told, he found it absolutely impossible at any stage seriously to doubt that they lay in that direction. In short, this propagandised subject may have to recognise that the raw uninterpreted feeling data should be augmented by an ascription of spatial location. Then whereas previously he might most radically have been inclined to say of the feelings no more than that they were ‘of the arm’ or ‘arm-ish’, he may now just a little less radically be prepared to say that they are ‘in the arm’ on the grounds that their position coincides with that of the arm: he sets them down in this way literally in the space occupied by the body! Now if we substitute for the propaganda the irrational attractions of a certain extreme evidentialist position of the kind temporarily endorsed in the thought-experiment, the above gives an indication of how one might come to endorse the second less radical theory (β). Namely: via a combination of fanatical empiricism offset by a modicum of good sense. Now besides locating sensations in space, it is usual to set them down in particular parts of the body. Then ought we to add this latter trait, along with the former, as an element of the original uninterpreted epistemological data? I believe we should at least hesitate before doing so. For it may be that, as noted above, spatial position is just a little less dubitable than limb position. So let us provisionally treat spatial position as ‘primary data’ and

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position in the body as ‘secondary data’; that is, opt for the moment for Theory (β). And let us test this theory by examining its implications and assumptions. I have been attempting to depict the overinterpretation of the word ‘feeling’ that tends to occur in epistemology. For the concept of feeling is a peculiar concept in that it tends to suggest the possibility of a pure and spaceless acquaintance with the psychological item that it singles out. Nonetheless, we have just seen that in the final analysis this idea is decidedly implausible. The idea that one is epistemologically stranded with no more than feeling is unconvincing, and the theory that this is how we know of body presence and position and movement looks untenable. In particular, we may be inclined to say that even the second less radical account (β) suffers from a serious deficiency. For it may seem that it omits a vital third basic datum. The fact that normally we are aware, not just of feelings, not just of the position of, but of the very movement of the feelings themselves! Indeed, we may say that, were the less radical theory (β) accepted as it stands, the experience of movement would have been dissolved away! For while it is true that in an experimental attempt to create illusions we may generate quales corresponding to movement, i.e. the so-called ‘kinaesthetic sensations’, there is nonetheless something of basic importance that we would have failed to duplicate; and it is something that brings the very expression ‘kinaesthetic sensation’ in doubt. Namely, the fact that the feelings themselves move! (c) The movement and position of feelings (1) I shall therefore in this Cartesian-ish thought-experiment provisionally assume that the basic datum consists in the quale and the position-inspace-of and movement-through-space-of the postural and kinaesthetic sensations. (That is, Theory (β).) So let us consider the idea that feelings can be given to the experiencing subject rather as can moths – as moving through space on their own. Are feelings ever given in this way? It hardly looks like it. When we ask a question like: ‘Where is the pain?’, we do not expect an answer like: ‘About a metre to the right of your hat and moving parallel to it down the corridor’, or even ‘On the straight line that links the arm-ish tickle and foot-ish tickle that you are causing.’ (And this is more than a matter of speech-pragmatics, and irrespective of the truth-value of physicalism.) And in fact many spatial properties ill become sensations: that is, as they are experienced. Thus, what could be meant by someone who attempted to pin

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onto sensations the spatial properties that are applicable to the limbs that harbour them? For example: straight/with a surface/and interior? Necessarily, we cannot experience them so. Still, it might be claimed, such properties are nonetheless strictly entailed by the fact that sensations occur in limbs. But in what sense of‘in’? (There is blood in them in a quite ordinary sense of the word.) Probably the unconscious comparison is with a fluid filling a vessel and taking on its shape. It seems that such an ‘entailment’ must be sheer stipulation. A stipulation such that ‘I experience a cylindrical pain’ is take as logically equivalent to the more complex ‘I experience a pain in a part of my body that is cylindrical & the pain is more or less evenly distributed throughout.’ But in any case this stipulation would not automatically determine the sense of other spatial sentences like ‘I experience a pain with a surface’ ‘. . . with an interior’ ‘. . . with a hollow interior’ (etc.). The stipulative attempt to confer a proper, and hence a rich spatial ‘grammar’ upon sensations, proceeds piecemeal all the way. (Always a bad sign!) In sum, the supposition that sensations are given to the experiencing subject as akin (say) to moths, with an absolute position in three-dimensional space, and hence with determinate and therefore sometimes with highly determinate boundaries, looks decidedly suspect. (2) If we entertain the idea that there exist kinaesthetic sensations, here understood to be feelings in their refined state with a minimum of ‘grammatical’ commitments, then we may well find that we are compelled to speak of our experience in this way: that is, endorse a theory of the kind of Theory (β). After all, we were prepared in our Cartesian-ish thoughtexperiment to ascribe some sort of spatial character to the feeling ‘given’: to say things like ‘I think the pain is nearer to my head than my feet’, ‘I think it is over to the right’ (etc.). Yet we have just seen that it is unclear what it means to speak of experiencing feelings that come to one as occupying a determinate sector of physical space. But let us temporarily set this difficulty aside and attempt instead to characterise further the less radical epistemological theory (β) that we have provisionally adopted. We there supposed that when a limb moves, the feelings resident in that arm likewise move, so that we are conscious not just of feelings, but of feelings and position-of-feelings and movementof-feelings – and that is all; so that we have an immediate experience of movement, not of the limb, but of the limb’s ‘sensuous charge’. Accordingly, if we are to create illusions of limb movement, we would need to reproduce not just an immediate experience of feelings, but an immediate experience of movement of those feelings. For even if the immediate ‘given’ is completely

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constituted of sensation, that immediate ‘given’ nonetheless includes the position and movement of those sensations. So, at least, runs the theory (β). (d) Natural and unnatural stipulative senses for ‘moving feeling’ (1) We have temporarily inserted movement-of-feelings amongst the raw uninterpreted basic epistemological data concerning the body. Yet our ordinary way of using ‘feeling’ is such that ‘change of location of feeling’ means something altogether different. Namely: change in the part of the body that harbours the one persisting sensation. For example: an appendicaloriginated pain starts at p1 at t1 , and – persisting from t1 to t2 – finishes up at p2 . And such an account is quite different from that adopted in the above ‘moth-like’ model of the situation. Thus, according to our everyday way of thinking, while I can be conscious of the movement of my hand from knee to face, and conscious of feelings in that hand as it moves, I am not also conscious of the movement of the pain in my thumb from knee to face, and to say that I am would generally be thought of as without sense. That is, it as yet has no sense, and can have no other sense than stipulation might confer upon it. Then what are natural stipulative senses for ‘experience of pain in midair’ ‘experience of pain moving through empty space’? Well, if a man were to say: ‘I used to suffer from gout, but my leg has been amputated and I now have the old gout-ish pain seemingly in my right foot which is seemingly at the end of my seemingly outstretched right leg’ – as explanation of ‘I have a pain in mid-air’ – this would be intelligible. But what would we say were he to claim that he had a pain that existed in mid-air simpliciter, i.e. not even seemingly in a seeming limb? Would not that baffle us? No stipulation seems natural here. A sensation can persist yet change its body site, and even do so in the merely seeming limb of an amputee, and in this sense we can understand ‘the sensation moved through empty space’. But if the amputee were to add: ‘The pain seems to have wandered away from my seeming leg and to be moving through empty space’; then here too we would be at a loss. For a pain’s being given as outside one’s body is, it seems, whether moving or stationary, an intelligible concept only if we suppose it existing in an appearance limb; and no stipulation can negate the force of this rule. Meanwhile we could construct even more extreme situations than the above, which seem perhaps to be intelligible. For example, we could imagine a dislocation of body position and the position in a neighbourhood of tactile sensations. More extreme still, we might even locate a pain in an anaesthetised novel

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body graft by locating its position in a three-dimensional ‘field’ of other sub-cutaneous pains. And perhaps even do so in a merely seeming limb. Indeed, we might even manage to set it wandering in such an apparition limb! And so on. Then my concern in describing these bizarre cases is to see how close we can get to having a sensation that simply ‘wanders through space’. I have been describing the contextual setting in which to locate and hence to comprehend utterances of the form ‘Sensation s moved through space’. But instead of approaching movement simpliciter, the only alternatives that confront us are, either the uninviting realm of senselessness, or the waste lands of stipulation. Nothing else. (2) Three distinct questions have been considered in this discussion of the epistemological ‘given’ in relation to the body. Can we make sense of the following utterances: ‘I have a pain that is seemingly in no part of my body’? ‘I have a pain but I have no idea in what or in which direction’? ‘I have a pain and am aware of its direction but not of the containing limb’? We have just rejected the first of these three utterances in (1) (above), and earlier in the discussion in section 3(b) rejected the second and tentatively and temporarily endorsed the third. Then it is clear that these latter two judgements rested heavily on intuition. That may have been wayward at the time, but it seemed somehow less fantastic to endorse the possibility of ignorance of limb rather than of direction. However, nothing is decisive in this terrain, and that is a matter of some importance. For if by contrast a man were to claim he was in pain but ignorant of the pain’s intensity, then we would reject that utterance out of hand – as we would if he said he did not know if the pain still existed. But the peculiar location claims that have concerned us, say, ‘Somewhere to the right of my shoulder and seemingly in no part of me’, just do not seem to have this finality about them. They are not obviously absurd. It is precisely this lack of finality that lies at the bottom of our perplexity over this problem. (3) This discussion has been concerned with the suggestion that a sensation might exist – either in a fixed or mobile position – without attachment to an actual or seeming known or unknown body part. The following is the situation, as it seems to me. I think it all but impossible to comprehend a claim concerning sensation position that detaches it from actual or seeming limb, e.g. ‘A pain to the right of my shoulder and not even in a seeming body part’. I accept that we can be ignorant of the position of a sensation, but nonetheless have difficulty in understanding ‘I

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do not know whether the pain is in jaw or knee’ – let alone ‘I have no idea where it is’ – let alone ‘It has no position in any seeming limb but has a position in physical space’! And the same goes for the movement of sensations. Thus, I accept ‘The appendical pain is moving across the abdomen’, and so ‘The pain is moving nearer to my right hand’; for we mean no more than that ‘This part of my abdomen is nearer my right hand than that part and the pain moves from this part to that part’, but this stipulation offers us no assistance when the sensation is supposedly detached from all seeming limbs. I conclude: the claim that the immediate ‘body sense’ datum is, not merely unattached, but spatialised unattached sensation, looks decidedly implausible. (e) R´esum´e I began the search for ‘the given’ in relation to the body by attempting to reduce the concept of feeling to a bare minimum, to strip it down to its supposed natural state. In the end, it seemed hardly to have a ‘grammar’ at all! For the most radical and Cartesian-ish account of the epistemological standpoint of a person to his body was this: from raw, uninterpreted, unlocated, feeling, he concludes as to the present spatial state of the bodything. I then queried whether this veridically represents feelings. Are feelings really such ‘bare particulars’ as this theory seems to assume? That is, are they given ‘natur’ stripped of all those relations that we usually take for granted? Then setting up a simple thought-experiment in which we attended to feeling alone, we found we could not erase from our minds the inclination to point in some direction when asked to point towards the feeling. Therefore, beginning to reinstate a ‘grammar’, we tentatively adopted feeling-at-a-place-in-space as a revised starting point, as the bodily epistemological ‘given’. Accordingly, we now find ourselves talking of a ‘skin’ or ‘coat’ of feeling (patchy, like shadows falling on the arm): a sensuous ghost arm: a something that is revealed in the nude in the ‘phantom limb’. Thus, we suppose that there exists both an arm-thing and a sense ‘skin’ that fits it. Alternatively, that a potential ‘skin’ – a sort of sensory surface formed by many paths of feelings, trailing through space like thin wisps of smoke, which are produced in real three-dimensional physical space by running objects along the arm-thing – literally fits an arm-thing. Whereupon the location of a sensation is determined thus: we run the tip of a finger along the body-thing until the sensation it produces occupies the same position on the sense ‘skin’ as does the sensation to be located; and this procedure

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is said to fix a point on the body-thing that we call ‘the location of a sensation’ (which is at once literally upon both ‘skin’ and body-thing)! Now occasionally the position of the sensation on the ‘skin’ fails to coincide with any limb-thing; and this will either be the ‘phantom’ limb situation or an illusion of a different kind (say, where limb-thing goes in one direction yet seemingly goes in another). According to this argument, when we are aware of the movement of the limb-thing this is effected not just through awareness of feelings endowed with certain quales, but through an immediate awareness both of the spatial properties and the movement through physical space of the feeling ‘skin’. Thus, in making the ‘skin’ move we make it seem to one that the arm-thing also moves; for ‘skin’ and arm-thing regularly move through identical tracts of space-time. And the movement of the ‘skin’ is evidence – rather as is the movement of visual sensations across the visual field evidence for movement in visible material objects – for the fact that the arm-thing has moved and through the same tract of space-time. So the theory goes. Now inasmuch as we had provisionally adopted the basic premiss or ‘given’ of feeling-at-a-point-in-physical-space, we had to ensure that we could give a bona fide sense both to the idea of unattached feeling and mobile unattached feeling. This project consisted in a search for appropriate stipulative conditions for – alternatively a set of possible uses of – ‘unattached feeling’ and ‘moving unattached feeling’ – which consisted in sketching a series of examples, most of them bizarre in the extreme, which might seem to fit the bill. Yet each case somehow fell short of the radical case that we needed. Thus, we could imagine a feeling that was unattached inasmuch as it seemed to be in a limb that was not there; or unattached with regard to a tactile neighbourhood, whether temporarily or permanently; and so on. But the search for the required conditions for the radical case of ‘movement simpliciter’ appeared doomed from the start. It seemed to be a necessity that the bodily sensation is putatively set in the body. 4. the given: a unitary whole (a) The question of epistemological priority This entire mythology of a sensory ‘skin’ began with a half-insightful criticism directed at the radical supposition that we might tell about limb posture or movement by feelings alone, i.e. by quales. Namely, that it is not enough to reproduce the feelings that regularly accompany posture or movement, for this fails to adequately reproduce the internal situation,

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which also involves both the position and the movement of feelings; so that it is not so much the character of the feelings that matters, it is their spatial properties. Then this criticism was in turn examined and found wanting. Yet what now strikes me as of great interest about that criticism is, that it is prepared to take as a basic premiss the claim (i) that we must know where to point if we are asked to locate the sensation, independently both of (ii) knowledge of the position of the limb, and (iii) knowledge of which limb the sensation is in. That is, (ii) and (iii) are supposed secondary to the primitive premiss, the assumed ‘given’, to premiss (i), and to be deductible from it via empirical generalisations. It is automatically assumed that one of these elements must be epistemologically in advance of the others. In actual fact these three elements are epistemologically on a par. That is, the basic ‘given’ is, not just feeling, not just feeling-in-aparticular-body-part, but feeling-in-a-particular-body-part-at-a-position-inbody-relative-physical-space; and so also, particular-body-part-at-a-positionin-body-relative-physical-space: the latter being disclosed along with and via the former and the former being disclosed along with and via the latter. Yet throughout the previous discussion one idea had been taken for granted; and that was, that at least one of the above three elements must remain open to doubt. But why so? Why should not these elements be equally fundamental? Is it because they would all then hang in mid-air – for they are linked together, and if no member of the chain will assume responsibility for truth then the chain of assertions must be empty of content? Or is it that illusion would otherwise be inexplicable? In any case, I opted provisionally for one of these three elements, viz. the position-in-physicalspace-of-feeling, as the ‘primitive premiss’. Yet far from being primary, there are grounds for describing that premiss as intelligible only on the condition that it is to be understood as an element of a unitary whole. Supposing that we had decided to use as premiss, that we must know in which limb the feeling is situated, and independently both of where in space that limb and its feelings were located. Then alternative theories of body epistemology would have been developed. For example, we would be unable to postulate a feeling ‘skin’ as epistemological mediator, and would as a result be faced with the problem of saying how it is that knowing (say) an ache is in one’s big toe enables one to know where to point when asked to indicate the position of that sensation. In that case we may be compelled to fall back upon, not the spatial properties of kinaesthetic sensations, but a constellation of sensory quales; whereupon we might once again find ourselves speaking of postural and kinaesthetic sensations, now in a truly serious sense. But here too we would be faced with insoluble difficulties.

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Thus, when feeling occurs the basic data, the ‘given’, is not feeling in (say) a cylindrical limb at a point in physical space, nor feeling in (say) a white limb at a point in physical space. It is less than that. But it is more than feeling, and more than feeling in a particular limb. And it simply never is feeling at a point in physical space alone. The ‘given’ is: feeling-in-a-particular-limbthat-is-at-a-point-in-body-relative-physical-space. To be sure, the limb can be indefinite, ‘some part of me’, and the point in physical space uncertain, ‘somewhere in that direction’, but the indefinition and uncertainty are never total. Feeling, space, body-part, all come together: no one in advance of the other: forming a unitary whole. It follows that the evidential ground of our awareness of the body cannot be feeling, in spite of the fact that awareness of feeling is not merely a sufficient, but a necessary condition of such awareness, i.e. is its source. It seems that nothing is the evidential ground.

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The location of sensations

We stand to our limbs in a relation of awareness. A concrete or intuitional awareness. And since that awareness ceases when feeling ceases, and despite the fact that feeling is not the evidential ground of the object of awareness, it must be a sensuous intuition. Then what information do we acquire in being thus aware? We learn of the presence of the limb, and of such properties as that it is straight or moving away from the body, i.e. of certain spatial properties of the limb. Now it was for reasons of this kind that I came in chapter 5 to conjecture that the proprioceptive ‘given’ might be sensations and their position in three-dimensional physical space. And this led naturally to the supposition that a ‘skin’ of spaced sensations is both the ‘given’ and the fundamental framework wherein sensations are located and the explanation of proprioceptive illusions and the X that is laid nakedly open to view in the phenomenon of ‘phantom’ limb. This is a piece of philosophical mythology. It rests I think in the final analysis on an unexamined thesis concerning the location of sensations. Namely, that sensations are given immediately to their owners as literally positioned in physical three-dimensional space. Then while this claim is mistaken, I have yet to demonstrate precisely why. To do so, I need to come by the criteria by which we manage to locate a sensation at some point in the body. Now such an enterprise has an especial relevance to the overall project of Part II – which is an investigation into the actual nature of, and the preconditions of the givenness of, the bodily will’s immediate object – and is in effect a continuation of the project of Part I of uncovering the criterial conditions of willing phenomena in an object. The special relevance is this. We have just seen in chapter 5 that the above theoretical account must be radically false. The proprioceptive ‘given’ is a rich and unitary whole which encompasses both the presence and spatial properties of the limb and the bodily location of the very sensations that ensure such a ‘given’. That is, the givenness of the will’s immediate object is inextricably linked with the givenness of the location of just those sensations that help to make it thus 203

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‘given’. This strongly suggests that uncovering what it is that enables a sensation to have a bodily position should help reveal what enables the bodily will to have its bodily object given to it, and in the immediate primitive manner that it requires. We shall in any case see that it does. 1. a theory of sense percept ion (a) A short proof of the existence of perceptual sensations It will greatly assist my account of the location of bodily sensations – such as itches and pains – if we can be certain of the existence, and the role in sense perception generally, of another category of sensation: namely, the type of sensation that is involved in such perceptual experiences as seeings and hearings. That is, what might be termed ‘perceptual sensations’. A short proof of their existence now follows. A man with sinusitis may of a sudden notice a faint ‘ringing’, and that ‘ringing’ may persist without respite for days. This phenomenon, not of noticing ‘ringing’, but of ‘ringing’ itself, which is the material object of the noticing event, is an instance of the type in question. And it has every right to be characterised as a sensation. I say so, because it is endowed with the requisite battery of typifying properties. Thus, (i) it is a quale, capable of greater or lesser intensity, endowed with location and extension of a kind; (ii) one can notice or fail to notice it, and one can actively direct attention onto it, so that it can be a possible immediate material object for the attention; and (iii) because it can elude awareness and yet continue in existence it cannot be the hypostatised internal object of an intentional perceptual consciousness; finally (iv) it is not the product of the belief or concept systems, absolutely must have an extra-psychological bodily cause, and one can state causally sufficient bodily conditions for its existence. So much for the reality of this type of phenomenon, and its general character as a sensation. The next thing to do is, demonstrate that a phenomenon of this kind is an ingredient of the veridical perceptual situation. Now when a man hears some real and particular sound, let us say as the word ‘I’, air waves must have caused some physical phenomenon, call it p, in his auditory nerves, which then caused a mental event of noticing a sound of type ‘I’ as an occurrence of the word ‘I’. Then had just such a bodily p been caused instead merely by sinusitis, and had that man’s attention been riveted elsewhere, p would I suggest still then be causing some auditory psychological something. My reason for saying this is, that were that man’s attention to be diverted away from its present ‘riveting’ object and

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into the auditory channel, he must surely then notice, not of course a real sound, since none was there to be heard, but something real and internal that sounds exactly as ‘I’ sounds: after all, this merely replicates the situation described in the previous paragraph in which a property of this kind obtained. It follows that such a sinusitis-originated and continuing p must be continually causing an auditory psychological something that exists independently of his noticing it. Now evidently that psychological something is the same in general type as the ‘ringing’ mentioned above, i.e. a sensation. It seems therefore that absolutely any example of the p-phenomenon will cause an auditory sensation, provided the right conditions obtain; those conditions being, first the inherence of the state consciousness, second the presence of satisfactorily functioning auditory cerebral equipment. Then since p and the above conditions obtained when the subject in question veridically heard the real sound ‘I’, p must have caused that sensation in that veridical situation. Moreover, since there cannot simultaneously occur two absolutely identical experiences of seeming to hear ‘I’, the noticing of the sensation as ‘I’ and the noticing of the sound ‘I’ must be one and the same event. In short, there are such items as auditory sensations, and they are an essential element of the veridical perceptual situation. The sound is one thing, the auditory sensation a second, the noticing-of-the-auditorysensation event – which is the event of hearing that sound – a third. All three phenomena occur when we veridically hear sounds. This argument can be generalised through the phenomenon of afterimages and/or phosphenes to visual perception, wherein a visual field of visual sensations which are (at the least) two-dimensionally arrayed mediates one’s perception of the environment, and thence sense perception generally. One should not be deflected in this argument by the heavy interpretational spatial (etc.) load that is placed upon the visual field of visual sensations in visual perceptual experience: these are merely additions to a situation that is basically the same as the auditory situation. (b) A defence of this theory of sense perception Objection might be taken to this theory of sense perception and particularly visual sense perception on several counts. Because of my use of the concept of sensation; concerning the assumption that visual sensations are arrayed in two-dimensional space; and over difficulties presented by hallucinations. Before I move on in section 2 to the main business of considering the location of sensations, I shall offer a brief comment on these three topics: sensations/the two-dimensionality of visual sensations/hallucinations.

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(1) I have in section 1(a) (above) listed a number of properties that are essential to sensations. I assembled these into groups, for it helps to display the distinctive character of sensations. The first group is of some real significance: being a quale, with intensity, and location and extension (of a kind). More important still were the second and third groups – which characterised the relation of the sensation to the attention; for the sensation is a possible but not certain immediate object for the attention; and it is such that in optimum circumstances (say, wakeful sanity, attention free, a hunt on for the sensation) it is under some description or other a certain immediate object for the attention. The fourth group was perhaps the most important of all: the absolute senselessness of the sensation, which is a product of the special type of its origin For since the sensation fails to exhibit intentionality (unlike, it may be, one’s awareness of sensations), and since its very last cause is of necessity physical non-psychological, concepts play no part in its genesis, whether causally or constitutively. It is neither ‘made out of’ concepts, nor ‘made by’ concepts. It is one might say a mere meaningless ‘it’, simply ‘there’ in consciousness as nothing else psychological is, lying about the mind like junk, almost indeed a sort of stuff. This seems to be unique to sensations. Then this constellation of properties: being a quale with intensity and location (of a kind), being a (merely) possible immediate material object for the attention and a certain such object in optimum circumstances, and being both intrinsically and extrinsically senseless, apply alike to afterimages and ‘ringings’ in the ears. This ensures that it is no mere conventionalist stipulation when we characterise these latter as sensations, and reminds us that sense-perception derives its title precisely because of the presence of the sensation in this epistemological transaction. It seems to me evident that such a senseless, or intrinsically and extrinsically intentionally undirected psychological ‘it’, occurs therein. And in particular in the sense of sight. A word on this last, far and away the most useful and impressive of the senses. Thus, precisely what are the main phenomena in the visual perceptual situation? And what are they called? And how do they relate? They are I believe two in number: one consisting in visual sensations given to one in (at least) two-dimensional body-relative physical space, the other being a phenomenon in the attention, viz. its taking the above two-dimensional array and the physical objects they represent as attentive object (for all sense perceivings are events in which sensations come to the attention). The first phenomenon has no name, but is in normal circumstances characterisable under multiple headings as: (essentially) ‘sensation entering

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visual field’/(inessentially) ‘light entering visual field’/(inessentially) ‘physical object entering visual field’. Then this groundwork phenomenon in the visual perceptual situation is the cause of, the necessary but insufficient condition of, and at the same time the necessary and immediate material object of, the second phenomenon. That second phenomenon does have a name, since it is for this that we usually reserve the term ‘see’. Inactive occurrences of the phenomenon, which is to say noticings, are ‘seeings’, ‘glimpsings’, ‘catching sight of ’ (etc.); while active occurrences, which is to say processive attendings, are ‘lookings’, ‘watchings’, ‘keeping an eye on’ (etc.). Then this second phenomenon, what one might very naturally dub ‘the impression’ or ‘the visual experience’, and which unlike the sensory array is indeed constitutively dependent upon the concepts resident in the mind of its owner, takes the form see as . . . . Now philosophers concerned with what they call ‘sense-datum theory’ can take their pick from these two phenomena: they can describe either the first, or the second, though not both! (in a mental ‘blur’), as the ‘sense-datum’; but let them make the distinction in the first place, and then let them avoid the snare of hypostatising the intentional object of the impression, or worse of denying the existence of the sensation on the grounds of the non-existence of such an hypostatic object! (2) Granted the existence of these sensuous entities in sense perception generally, why should we assume that in visual perception they form a 2D array in body-relative physical space? Well, I say in body-relative physical space, because the psychological datum is, not merely a set of simultaneous visual sensations, and not just the fact that those sensations are given as standing to one another in relations like next-to and farther-off-than, but in addition that they are given to one as lying in real physical directions out from the body. Then why 2D? Why not 1D or 3D? Now it is evident that any visual experience will present to awareness, not merely colour instances and various measures of proximity between simultaneous colour instances, but 2D shapes like roundness and triangularity, and suchlike. Clearly, the psychological given must be either 2D or 3D. Then why not 3D? Does not that accord better with experience? Well, it may be that in binocularity it is so. But if we confine the discussion to monocular vision – as I propose to do throughout this entire discussion – then two simple facts decisively put paid to the suggestion that the visual given might be 3D: the first is, that the last cause of the visual sensation is necessarily physical non-psychological; the second, that psychological factors like concepts and knowledge of the look of things and perhaps in addition an experiential history of a certain kind

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(and conceivably also evolution-determined interpretational propensities), all play a causal part in the genesis of monocular visual depth experience. For if the entry of depth into a visual field is the entry of an array of visual sensations all of which have non-psychological causes, and if it is also true that concepts and knowledge of the look of things (etc.) play a part in the genesis of the experience of depth in the monocular visual impression, then it is certain that those sensations cannot in themselves make visible the depth that they bring forward for visual consciousness. If only mental factors like concepts/knowledge of types/knowledge of the look of types/etc. can unlock to view the depth that is potentially visible through the medium of sensations, those sensations cannot in themselves lie in a depth that matches the depth they bring to view; and that is to say, that a representative theory of visual depth is unacceptable in the case of monocular vision. (Binocular vision being a different story altogether.) Indeed, since any visual depth experience depends upon seeing one’s visual sensations as contributing the colour of physical items situated at some distance from one, and therefore upon the swinging into play of one’s conceptual apparatus, it seems certain that visual sensations cannot in themselves lie in a psychologistically given depth. In short, monocular visual sensations must be distributed in two rather than three dimensions. (I emphasise once more that these considerations apply, not to binocular visual experience, but to monocular experience only. The Julesz experiment reveals a very different situation in the case of binocular vision, for here the uniformity of depth-experience transcends the knowledge and concepts (etc.) present in the mind of the perceiver.) (3) The claim that monocular visual sensations are merely twodimensionally distributed finds corroboration in the fact that, just as two completely indistinguishable and wholly veridical colour photographs can be of different scenes presenting different depth situations, so two visual fields of sensations could be internally indistinguishable and yet thanks to the diverse concepts and beliefs and histories of their owners cause different veridical visual depth-impressions, i.e. different depth-perceivings. Does not this show that those sensations must lie in an order that, in being independent of the concepts/knowledge/beliefs/history etc. resident in the minds of their owners, and therefore also of the depth content of any resulting visual impression, must itself lack depth? And the optical facts further corroborate this account of monocular depth experience. Thus, consider (Fig. 3) the light from a scene approaching an eye: a transit that is so rapid that it seems stationary and homogeneous down the line of sight. Then a full specification of the optical data coming

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S

P Q

P′

P′

Q′

Q′

Fig. 3

through space is given entirely in 2D terms. For if we were to set up a screen S to intercept the beams of light, we would manage to collect all the data simply by specifying the colour-and-brightness value of each point on the two-dimensional surface S. A dimension more and we collect the same, a dimension less and we collect no more than a line. Then note that nothing represents the gulf between P and Q. Indeed, it is clear that, just as those two indistinguishable photographs can represent different depth situations, so the light coming from P and Q is theoretically consistent with diverse depth causes. It follows that the optical data coming from P and Q must be, depending on the prevailing circumstances, evidence for different depth situations. So how can the sensations that these light beams cause lie in a depth that matches the reality? And how can they lie in any depth of their own if only concepts/knowledge/expectations/history can unlock the experience of depth? Then it is precisely those concepts and beliefs etc. in the mind that do justice to the prevailing circumstances (which may even include the spatial layout of the physical setting in which the species evolved), while the purely sensuous contents of the visual field do justice to the factor of sight. The product of their interaction is the visual impression (see Fig. 4). Mind

Impressions of depth

Sensations (2D-arrayed – with orientation)

Concepts, etc.

Fig. 4

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(4) This account of sense perception has a difficulty to face in the hallucination. For if the sensation is both immediate cause and immediate necessary material object of the perceptual experience, must not this also be true of the hallucination? For is not the hallucination indistinguishable from the visual experience? Yet surely the cause of the hallucination is a state of the mind rather than a sensation? The mistake here lies in the assumption that because the hallucination seems the same experience as perceiving, it must be the same experience as perceiving; and this probably derives from assuming that all ‘seeming seeings’ are so in the sense that they are the same experience as the experience of seeing. Yet it is clear that this is false. For a mental image is a seeming seeing, but not in the sense of being the same experience as seeing. Likewise the hallucination. While the image is a seeming seeing in the sense of being a specific kind of ‘as if ’ seeing, hallucinatory seeing is a seeming seeing in the sense of seeming to its owner to be the same experience, i.e. such that he would say it was the same were he to believe he could trust his judgement. Yet it is not the same experience. For it is not a visual experience. Like the mental image, it is an event in the visual imagination; and differs from the mental image, not in that one need believe either in its content or even that it is the same experience as seeing, but in its being experienced as the same experience. A necessary condition of visual experience is, that the attention is causally and attentively engaged by visual sensations, and the hallucination is not so engaged. And so hallucinatory situations must be differently structured from perceptual situations. Whereas visual perception is a fiveterm relation, between subject-awareness-sensation-light-object, the visual hallucination is at most three-term, between subject-hallucination-object. Hallucinations do not take sensations as their external or material object, even though one can hallucinate the having of sensations. Indeed, they have neither sensation objects nor causes. Accordingly, they constitute no difficulty for the theory of perception which I am proposing. A few general comments. Whereas some episodes in the visual imagination are merely victories for the imagination over a firm sense of reality, e.g. seeming to see faces in the fog during trench warfare, all hallucinations necessarily are caused by a diminution in one’s sense of reality, e.g. even the first slight hallucinations of mescalin takers that occur without delusions of any kind. Then some hallucinations manifest damage to but not loss of the sense of reality, e.g. Macbeth asked: ‘Is this a dagger . . . ?’, and that he voiced a question, beautifully demonstrates in the instant, first that he has not yet left us (the world), second that he is not properly with us (in the world). But some hallucinations carry all before them, as when Macbeth addresses

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Experiences Experiences with visual content Visual experiences

Episodes in the visual imagination Illusions Hallucinatorial Delusive Aware of pain

Mental image

First mescalin sights

Macbeth,s dagger

Banquo,s ghost

Seem see face in fog

Aware of afterimage

Veridical seeing

Fig. 5

Banquo’s ghost with the words: ‘Never shake thy gory locks at me!’, which is indicative of total delusion and complete loss of the sense of reality. The schema (Fig. 5) summarily represents these facts. 2. the actual physical location of sensat ions (a) The actual physical location of after-images Let us return to the main problem of the present chapter. Thus, we wish to know what is, and how properly to determine, the location of bodily sensations. Then we would do well to ask a comparable question concerning another type of sensation, viz. the visual sensation: for example, the afterimage (or phosphene, etc.). For it seems to me that, just as the mind automatically ‘projects’ the after-image onto walls and skies, so it ‘projects’ the bodily sensation onto the unique framework available for items of this kind. That is, the human body. Indeed, as we shall see, it first and foremost ‘projects’ it onto the body-image; and thence, and only secondly, albeit immediately, onto the body itself. Where is the after-image? Not on the retina or on the eye. Not on the wall on which we see it; for demolition of the wall only releases further spaces for it. Not merely in a certain direction; for how can a phenomenon lie in no more than a direction? Not merely in the middle of the visual field; for that gives no information about the spatial locality of the item itself. Then

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is it a reality? Or is the reality instead merely one’s having an after-image? It is a true individual: an entity that can be differentially singled out by the attention; though one that, like motion, necessarily is attached to some something that owns it, viz. its owner. Yet I reject the supposition that the after-image has no more refineable a location than its owner. After all, the one after-image could persist even if its owner were to lose his feet – while his brain remained intact – an instant after the after-image came into being; which surely implies that it occurred somewhere between hair and ankles; so that it must have happened in a differentiable sector of the body. No doubt in the brain. For where else? This conclusion may seem a trifle paradoxical in the light of the fact that we locate it on walls (etc.). But this is because we fail to take note of the heterogeneity of ‘where’-questions. For consider: ‘Where is the pebble?’ ‘In his shoe’; ‘Where do thoughts occur?’ ‘In the mind’; ‘Where does the letter “z” occur?’ ‘At the end of the alphabet’; ‘Where is the phosphene?’ ‘In the middle of the visual field’; ‘Where do after-images occur?’ ‘On the surface of whatever physical object happens to share some part of the visual field with them.’ Thus, ‘Where?’ might ask for (i) the region of space they occupy, (ii) their domain of being, (iii) the part of the domain of being in which they occur, (iv) the sector of a sense field, (v) the point in real physical space at which they are experienced to be. So we ought not to assume in the case of after-images that because they are experienced at some real place p, and because that gives a true answer to a genuine ‘where?’-question, their location in physical space must be p. Indeed, it seems to me that to the question ‘Where are after-images?’, we might simultaneously offer five different true answers. Either: in the brain, in the domain of the psychological, in the less mental sub-sector of the domain of the psychological, in a sector of the visual field, on whatever physical object happens to share with it a sector of the visual field. It should be noted that when we locate the after-image in the visual field, we commit ourselves to no particular thesis concerning its actual physical location, for the position of a sensation in a sense field need stand in no systematic or projective relation to the actual position in space of the sensation. Now the monocular visual field is a sense field, i.e. a twodimensional psychological continuum wherein sensations stand to one another in merely two-dimensional relations like ‘adjacent-to-left’, ‘lessadjacent-to-right’, ‘above’, ‘below’, which are such that a continuous path through contemporaneous sensations of that type leads from any one point in that field to any other point: a schema which allows for boundaries, blind spots, etc. Thus, after images occur in a two-dimensional sensuous

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spatial system. Yet why should there be a systematic relation between the two-dimensional relations within that system and their actual positions in physical space? There is probably one and only one answer to the question: ‘Which region of physical space is occupied by after-images?’ Namely: a region in the brain. (b) The actual physical location of bodily sensations This discussion assists us when we turn to the bodily sensation. It counsels us to recognise that the sentence: ‘Where is the bodily sensation?’, has several interpretations. So let us begin the inquiry by addressing ourselves to the question of the first and most basic type, viz. a (i)-type ‘where’question. Thus: ‘Which region of physical space is occupied by the bodily sensation?’ We know that the bodily sensation is a phenomenal reality, with physical event causes and effects and a determinate location in time. Accordingly, it seems likely that it has a determinate location in physical space. But where? Well, a pain in the foot that is caused by a pinprick has not even begun until the neurological message reaches the brain; and were the foot to be removed when that message had travelled but to the knee the pain would still occur; and we cannot suppose that the brain effects of that message cause a psychological phenomenon in the foot, let alone a psychological phenomenon in the foot that necessarily cannot occur if the brain does not exist or is dead! And how in any case can a psychological phenomenon be set in a foot? Thus, the pain can hardly be in the foot! Moreover, pain necessarily requires phenomena in the brain of its owner if it is to occur, and necessarily has all-but-contemporaneous physical causes therein. So surely it is somewhere. But surely the pain in the foot is located either in the brain or the foot or nowhere. Then since it is not in the foot, and not nowhere, it must be in the brain. I take this to be its actual position in three-dimensional physical space. Yet we are inclined to insist that really a pain in the foot must be in the same space as the foot. After all, ‘the place of the pain’ and ‘the part of the body that hurts’ are logically equivalent, and the latter expression singles out a real body part. So must not the former? Certainly it must – but so what? Why must that real place in physical space be occupied by the sensation? In any case the above two descriptions evoke different theoretical expectations. The former suggesting autonomy for the sensation, of the kind one might impute to a sooty smudge situated on a limb, the latter suggesting that a

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sensation gets its position in space only through the position of the item that supports it. Now each of these suggestions is seriously awry, though the former more so. For the former leads us to suppose that what we call ‘the place of the pain’ is the position in space of a self-subsistent phenomenon, a position which happens contingently to coincide with the position in space of the limb wherein we site it, and that the position of the pain has no essential link with the seeming position of seeming parts of the body, thereby generating an entire mythology of a body-image composed of such luminous will-o’-the-wisp entities. While the latter leads us to suppose that what we call ‘the place of a pain’ is the actual position in physical space of a phenomenal something that necessarily is of something with which necessarily it shares position (as happens with movement). This account, in tightly linking ‘the place of a sensation’ with the real place on the limb, is to that extent insightful, but misguided in supposing that that is where it actually is. The fact that we use ‘the place of the pain’ and ‘the part of the body that hurts’ interchangeably may lead us to suppose that, as the latter place is the real physical place of that body part, so therefore must the first-mentioned ‘place of the pain’ be the real physical place of the pain. But after all, ‘on the wall’ cites a real physical place, and is truly assigned to a real after-image. And yet the after-image is not a psychological something that wanders on walls! ‘The place of the after-image’, which mentions a real place and a real after-image, so uses ‘of ’ that it does not state the sector of space in which the after-image occurs. Likewise, ‘the place of the pain’: these psychological entities do not literally inhabit extra-cerebral body sites like teeth and feet. 3. projection and psychological space From this point on I shall be concerned expressly and differentially with the location of sensations, taken not in the sense in which we locate physical phenomena in physical space, but in the usual and vastly familiar sense in which we position feelings in various parts of the body. Thus, bodily sensations, which literally occupy a space in the brain, get located nonetheless in such disparate places as teeth and hands. Two very interesting questions then suggest themselves. In what sense and by what means do these items which are actually in one place come to be set in these different places? And to what extent is their being sited in bodily extremities due to their standing to one another in psychologically given spatial relations which match the spatial relations holding between these body parts? The first of these questions leads me to into a brief consideration of a phenomenon

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that I call ‘projection’; the second to the topic of sensory or psychological space. Through these concepts we manage significantly to relate and simultaneously significantly to distinguish the location of bodily sensations and the location of visual sensations. At the same time this puts us in a position to provide a very general and merely preliminary answer to the question: What do we mean in speaking of ‘the location of a sensation’? (a) Projection When ordinarily we locate sensations, we mention a real place, a real sensation, and assign one to the other. ‘My pain is here’, one says, pointing to a tooth. Yet we are not saying where in space it is, since it is in the brain. Then if this real place in a tooth is not the place of the sensation, of what is it the real place? The most illuminating comparison is with: ‘The after-image is on the wall’, for it seems that the bodily sensation must be projected onto the limb as the image is onto the wall, where to be ‘projected’ is for a psychological item to be experienced as inhabiting some physical something that lies without the mind of the experiencer. It seems that the place of the sensation must be the place it is experienced to be, that place being of necessity a part of the body. As the after-image is projected onto whatever physical item occupies its sector of the visual field – and items in physical space projectively sustain visual sensations when eyes are open – so the bodily sensation is projected onto the one physical landscape capable of sustaining it, viz. the animal body that is veridically given to the awareness of its owner. Thus, as the array of purple-ish visual sensations had with closed eyes gives way on opening those eyes to an array presenting to awareness the real contents of physical space, so the bodily sensations produced (say) by brain stimulation in one whose brain has temporarily been all but disconnected neurologically from the rest of his body, gives way to an array of sensations projected successfully onto the now reconnected torso and limbs. Then in either successful case, sensations that are seemingly of some something – round red object (in sight) – paining big toe at end of leg (in feeling) – manage veridically both to bring something to awareness (sun, toe) and to land successfully projectively onto that projective sustainer (sun, toe). In short, we become aware of the contents of space and of individual points on our body, through projecting these brain-located phenomena onto the unique items that can support them, viz. the physical world, and one’s body. Thus, the phenomenon of projection proves paradoxically to be the device whereby concrete intuitional awareness of the projective sustainer is realised!

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It is that through which we become aware of the spatially removed. Like a fisherman we throw out the two-dimensional net of the visual field, and like him again we haul back to consciousness the whatever the net managed appropriately to fit, while it is as a sort of spear fisherman that we throw out the bodily sensation, and haul back to consciousness the whatever bodily place it was destined to skewer. Roughly, as visual sensation is to physical objects at large, the bodily sensation is to particular points in the body. (b) The unlikeness of sight and touch in respect of psychological space (1) We can imagine a permanently blind man learning to single out and to identify the colour of various visual sensations in his visual field which have been induced in him by ocular stimulation. And we can in addition imagine him learning to order those sensations into structures which are spatial and yet sensuous, as when he singles out a blue triangle or a red circle under those concepts. Finally, we must recognise that those two structured sensory patches will be given to him as lying in specific directions in relation to his body: for example, he may experience (say) the blue triangle as lying a little to his left and a little above the red circle. One important fact that this thought-experiment demonstrates is, that visual sensations can be individuated and spatially structured independently of any material object ‘receivers’. This is because monocular visual sensations form a two-dimensionally ordered sense-field, which paradoxically is given simultaneously in intra-sensuous psychological terms wherein the concepts of extent and shape find instantiation and directionally in body-relative physical space. Thus, a permanently blind man might be able to see (say) that one yellow point is separated by a greater extent of black visual sensation from a blue point than it is from a red point – and also be perceiving in so doing the diverse measures of two physical angular directions out from his body – for he will simultaneously be perceiving the directions in body-relative physical space in which lie the several coloured points. It is a tempting but serious error to suppose that he would be perceiving no more than a sensuous extent, a sensuous extent which happens to relate in regular fashion to bodily extent: in effect, to postulate the existence of an autonomous ‘visual space’, a sensuous domain wherein spatial relations like circularity and linearity exist, which is distinct from physical space. The facts rather are that, in perceiving sensuous extent he is at the same time perceiving an angular sector of physical space. This perplexing double property of sensations, whereby there exists sensuous extent which is simultaneously a physical angular extent, is a direct consequence of the fact

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that we individuate sensations of absolutely all kinds – whether they be bodily, visual, or auditory – by assigning them appropriate sites in bodyrelative physical space. It is this latter fundamental principle of individuation which permits us to have two simultaneous indistinguishable bodily sensations – say, a dull ache in one’s left thumb and a dull ache in one’s right thumb – as we cannot simultaneously harbour two thoughts with identical content. (2) Then despite this important congruence of sensory extent and physical directional extent, the fact remains that visual sensations can be individuated and spatially arranged altogether independently of any material object ‘receivers’. Now there can be no analogue of this property in the case of the sense of touch, even though, because the skin envelope convolutes as a two-dimensional surface in three-dimensional space, and because touch sensations get located thereon and can be adjacent and so form a continuum, one is inclined to postulate the existence of an autonomous twodimensional touch sense-field convoluting in three-dimensional physical space. Even more mysteriously, one is inclined to postulate an autonomous touch sense-field that is set convoluting in a purely psychological threedimensional space, exactly as visual sensations seemed at first blush to be set in a purely psychological two-dimensional sensory space. Now the major unlikeness of sight and touch in these particular spatial respects are as follows (always remembering that we are speaking of experienced and not of actual place). (1a) While monocular visual sensations are two-dimensionally arrayed in body-relative physical space, the given distances therein have no linear measure in millimetres or miles, but (1b) the only places in which touch sensations are set are real places in physical space that are separated by real distances, or putative examples of such. (2a) Visual sensations are set in their two-dimensional system independently of landing upon material object ‘receivers’, but (2b) a touch sensation has a place in three-dimensional physical space only if it is at and of a body part. (3a) Each part of the visual field has a sensation value, but (3b) each point on the skin surface is (in fact) not the continuing bearer of a sensation. (4a) The visual sensation is simply ‘red and bright’ (say), and is not as such putatively of some physical object (e.g. balloon), but (4b) each bodily sensation is either merely putatively or else actually of a body part (e.g. headache, toothache, earache).

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So there is no autonomous 2D 3D touch sense-field, set either in physical space and independent of the body-thing, or else set in a purely psychological space which likewise is independent of the body-thing, into which tactile (and indeed bodily sensations generally) are to be located. Then while sight shares some of these properties with touch, there exist significant differences between the two senses. Thus, in the case of visual sensations one could start ‘inside’, let us say if one were blind from birth, and be aware of those sensations and even order them spatially in a two-dimensional field which is at once psychological-sensuous and physical-directional; and only then, with the late advent of the normal powers of sight, proceed ‘outside’ and ‘project’ them onto items in the physical world. But there could be no analogous working from ‘inside’ to ‘outside’ in the case of tactile and bodily sensations, even in one whose brain happened temporarily to be neurologically disengaged from the rest of the body. Those sensations are from the start necessarily putatively of body-parts. And the one and only spatial system into which they fit is the one that has application when they successfully ‘project’. That is, the public physical space of the body. Thus, the bodily sensation, whether tactile or not, whether of the skin (e.g. tickle) or in depth (e.g. ache), set in fact in the brain, gets its one and only possible experienced space either through successfully ‘projecting’ onto a body-part or else putatively doing so; whereas the visual sensation, set likewise in fact in the brain, first of all has a two-dimensional experienced space which is at once psychological/sensuous and physical directional, and thence and only secondly ‘projects’ onto the objects whose seen colour and contour it displays. A major difference. (3) So much for the differences between visual and tactile sense. This discussion has shed light, not merely upon tactile sensations and the sense of touch, but upon bodily sensations generally. Indeed, from what emerged I find myself in a position to offer a provisional very general characterisation of ‘the location of a bodily sensation’ in the sense under investigation. The location of a bodily sensation is the real point on the presently existing body-part of its owner at which it really and not merely seemingly is experienced to be. Accordingly, if the body-part is not there, or if the sensation fails to successfully ‘project’ onto an existing part and is hence not really experienced at any body-part, then in the sense under consideration the sensation has no location. It merely seemingly has. Why not? This is the resolution of the problem of the location of ‘phantom’ limb sensations. Now despite the lack of a location in the usual familiar sense for a sensation which fails to ‘project’ onto the body, such a sensation has a

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sensuous location in relation to other contemporaneous sensations: for example, it may be nearer to a tickle than a twinge. However, this sensuous proximity is not a proximity in a purely sensuous domain. Rather, it is a sensuous proximity which is simultaneously putatively a nearness in the body (that happens not to be actualised). While bodily sensations are not directionally given to their owner as are visual and auditory sensations, since they are not experienced ‘from’ anything other than the body in which they are set, so that no physical angular measure is perceived in perceiving the sensuous extent separating them, that sensuous extent is nonetheless putatively also a body distance. 4. at tem pting to state the criteria and sense of ‘p l ace of a sensation’ The time has come to try and state the criteria by which in the familiar sense we locate toothaches in teeth and foot tickles in feet. What are the absolutely binding requirements for a sensation’s managing to project successully onto some particular body part? We shall see that this is no easy question, and the attempt to answer it, which takes us through sections 5–7, leads into somewhat wide ranging issues in the mind-body epistemological problem. (a) The special difficulty of the question of the location of sensation Before I consider this problem, a general comment on the problem itself. The very question, ‘How does one know the pain is in the tooth?’, is baffling. To be sure, the pain seems to be in the tooth and doubtless appearances are not here deceptive, so in this sense the question has a simple enough answer, viz. it seems that way and seemings are unlikely to be deceptive in this situation. Yet the unlikeness of this question to three closely related questions emphasises its peculiarity. Namely, (i) How does one know that one colour is next to another? (ii) How does one know that a sound comes from some place? (iii) How does one know that one’s legs are crossed? Thus, in the visual case (i) we can see both colours, and can perceive that the relation holds, and we do so by perceiving the relation. In the auditory case (ii) one of the relata (viz. oneself ) is not a sound, so that although we can hear and perceive that the relation holds, we do not do so through perceiving an auditory relation. In the proprioceptive case (iii) the sense in which one feels one’s legs are crossed is a-typically sense-perceptual, for we are unable to say what it is about the ‘feel’ that tells us the legs are related thus. So in all three cases there is an answer to ‘How do you know of this relation?’, but

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there is in each case a diminishing content to the answer. Then there is by contrast nothing one can say to ‘How do you know the pain is in the tooth?’ – except to affirm that ‘It seems to be there.’ It is not that one perceives that it is: thus, one does not perceive the ache, perceive the tooth, and perceive a relation between the two; and neither does one perceive the ache – though not the tooth – and yet somehow or other perceive the relation; nor does one know through some accompanying experience. One experiences toothache, and that is all one experiences. To be sure, one experiences it as at a place. But such an experience is not additional to experiencing it. It is the necessary mode in which bodily sensations are experienced. (b) First attempts to state the criteria (1) Then what are we doing when, in the familiar speech enterprise, we name a real place on the body as ‘the place of the sensation’? As noted above, we are giving the place onto which it is projected; which is to say, the place at which it is experienced to be. But what does that mean? This question would be answered if we could discover the criteria by which we fix the locus of a sensation. Indeed, bearing in mind that ‘the place of the sensation’ is not its position in space, it seems that the very sense of ‘the place of the sensation’ would be fixed thereby. Thus, what we now seek is, not the evidence usually employed by the subject (for we have seen that usually he employs none), not just considerations that could occasionally overrule the subject’s reports (for it may be that these could be bettered), but certain requirements that must in all cases be met and that fix the locus absolutely. And so I see no contradiction in supposing that usually the subject knows more or less no-how, and that what he knows must nonetheless meet certain possibly very complicated requirements. Accordingly, I now address myself to the question: What are the criterial tests whereby we determine, in the familiar sense in which we locate pains in teeth and itches on scalps, that a bodily sensation is situated at a certain place p on the body? I begin by considering several simple but unacceptable answers, hoping by these means to ‘coast up to’ the correct answer. (2) (i) The first and simplest preliminary suggestion is: that at the very least the place of the sensation must be the place in public physical space of the part it is in. But this neglects the fact that, just as the position of the sun in the earth’s sky is necessarily earth-relative, so the place of a sensation is necessarily body-relative. Thus, suppose a cyclist has a persistent toothache. Then in the special sense under consideration, there is no change in the

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location of that sensation as the cyclist moves through the landscape. This is a simple consequence of the fact that necessarily we projectively locate bodily sensations on the unique terrain that is capable of sustaining such ‘projectiles’: the body. (ii) The next most simple suggestion is: that the place of a sensation is the place of its cause. (For is not that ‘the place that hurts/itches/tingles . . .’?) But this theory cannot cope with the existence of ‘referred sensations’. Then what are the criteria of ‘referred sensations’? They are: that the cause of the sensations is at some place p and the sensation is felt at some q and p = q. For example: an inflamed appendix causes a pain that is felt in the umbilicus. Yet how is it determined that it is felt in the umbilicus? Our ignorance of the criteria does not prevent our readily settling this matter by such tests as these. That it truly seems to the subject that it is there; that to run one’s finger along the skin, until one is causing a sensation that is adjacent to the pain, is to trace a path to the umbilicus. It follows that ‘the place that is hurting’ must be ambiguous: as between ‘the part that is cause of the pain’ and ‘the place of the pain’ (in the sense under investigation). Mostly, but not always, for any pain these expressions single out one place. But it is a posteriori that they do. (iii) Then is the place of a sensation the place it really seems to the normally conscious subject to be? But two objections quash this suggestion: the fact that we may erroneously locate a sensation, which is in a ‘phantom’ limb, in an absent limb; and the fact that we may honestly report to (say) a dentist that a pain is in a certain molar when it is in fact in a neighbouring tooth. (iv) We might attempt to adjust our criteria to meet these difficulties by insisting, first that the ‘phantom’ be of a functioning attached limb, second that there be an allowance for minor error. Then these new criteria will be overthrown if it can be shown that it is possible for a normally wakeful subject to be grossly mistaken about sensation position even though the limb in question is a functioning part of the body. The following grotesque example proves that it is. Suppose we drape a man’s neurologically attached hand-skin over his foot, and stick a pin into it. In that case its owner would surely believe, not merely that he felt a pain on his hand’s skin, but also in or on his hand. But he undoubtedly felt a pain on his hand’s skin, and that is not where his hand is. And the pain cannot be in two distinct places. Therefore he did not feel a pain in or on his hand. It follows that one can be grossly in error when it seems to one in one’s wakeful right mind that a sensation is at some part of or point in one’s body, even though the part in question is still part of one’s body. Equally importantly, it shows that

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it is by no means an incorrigible datum that a sensation lies in a certain direction (e.g. to the right). (v) Nor can the place of the sensation be the place of (say, many) other sensations that we would judge to be adjacent to the sensation in question. For if in the above ghoulish example one tapped his wrist, then he would erroneously believe that the sensation of contact was adjacent to the the pain caused by the pin. In sum. The place of the sensation is not a position relative to the fixed stars. Not the place of its cause. Not the place one would initially say that it was. Not the place of many sensations of which one would say: ‘They are adjacent to it.’ And yet in normal circumstances most of these ‘tests’ are simultaneously satisfied, along with whatever are the decisive tests. And this coheres nicely with the fact that normally the subject knows more or less no-how where it is. Then here is one final ‘test’ before we take stock in (3) (below) of the position that has been reached. (vi) It is not a sufficient condition of a sensation s being in limb L that L then exists as part of the body and s seems to be in an L-type limb. For the subject may be an ex-amputee who has just received an L-graft such that it cannot be said that the prevailing phenomenon of ‘phantom’ is a veridical awareness of the present resident L-type limb. To be sure, a new L limb can, so to say, walk into the shoes of an old L, as when a limb L is amputated and replaced immediately in full health by an exactly similar L; for this will surely suffice for the ‘phantom’, which has both a general internal object (e.g. of a hand) and if successful a particular material object (e.g. of this hand), to count as veridically of the new replacement limb. That is, awareness of a new limb is here established upon the ground of an old awareness. Yet it is important to note that more than the conjunction of a ‘phantom’ of an L and a present actual L, is required for that awareness to obtain. For example, there need to be normal neurological links such that a regular match of spatial and tactile seemings and realities is established. Presumably, normal neurological links are needed at all the right neurological places, linking in turn to the right centres in the brain. (3) Thus, by ‘the sensation is at p’ we do not mean any of the following: We do not mean: it is at p relative to the fixed stars. We do not mean: the cause is at p. We do not mean: it seems to one to lie in that (p-) part of physical space. We do not mean: it seems to one to lie in that (L-) part of one’s body. We do not mean: it seems to one to lie in that part of one’s body and that part is here and now a real part of one’s body.

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We do not mean: it is surrounded by sensations which are all in the neighbourhood of p. (This would introduce circularity: the entire array supporting itself in mid-air like Baron Munchhausen!) We do not mean: it is seemingly surrounded by sensations which are all seemingly in the neighbourhood of p. And we do not mean any combination of the above (and we do not mean any combination of the above ‘give or take a little error’). And yet it will emerge that we do mean something that encompasses these several factors. That is, the factors of physical causation, of immediate seeming, and the presence of something closely akin to a sense field. For the proper and complete analysis of ‘the location of a sensation’ is given by a statement in which these apparently disparate factors find representation in unified and mutually supportive manner. The aim of the discussion which follows in sections 5–6 is the discovery of that statement. (c) A preliminary very general statement of the criteria But I shall first of all prepare the way with a few general observations. When sensations have a location, they can only be set in actual or prosthetic limbs that are part of a body that is internalised in the body-image. Indeed, even when they fail to successfully alight upon the flesh, say in mere ‘phantom’ limbs, the flesh remains their sole aspiration; for while they can like ghosts hovering in ‘phantom’ sites find themselves divorced from the flesh, they can nonetheless find no other home. Thus, while these psychological phenomena, viz. sensations, must occur in the material organ of the mental, viz. the brain, they are necessarily either successfully or merelyfailingly-yet-aspiringly projected onto the only terrain capable of sustaining them: the body. More precisely, onto the suitably internalised body, and thence, with luck, the body itself. Whereas the visual sensation is merely characteristically experienced as of the (internalised) physical world, the body sensation is necessarily experienced as of the (internalised) body. Its projective destination is of its very essence. But it is one thing to have a destination and another to arrive. Thus, in visual perception the mind putatively projects brain-located sensations onto seeming physical items; and actual physical items may, through satisfying the conditions of such a relation, manage to ‘receive’ the projections of colour and contour, whereupon we see the item. (For seeing is a successful projecting.) Analogously, while the bodily sensation is in the brain, putative projection inevitably occurs onto some point-part in the body; and if there then exists such a body part, and if in being aware of that sensation in a

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seeming part one is actually aware of that real part, the projection of the sensation onto the part is accomplished. Therefore the sense of ‘the place of the sensation’ must be, ‘the part of the body that the sensation as such brings forward for consciousness’, and this explication of the sense must also and at once be, a completely general statement of the criteria of ‘the place of a sensation’. The place of a bodily sensation must be, the real place, of the real and seemingly present body part, of which one is really aware, and in which the sensation is seemingly located. Now the presence of a ‘seemingly’ at the end of this formulation permits the sensation to be in fact in the brain. Thus, as befits the concept of projection, seeming is an all-important necessary condition of being at a place. But because a project requires a ‘receiver’, it is not a sufficient condition of successful projection; and requires supplementation by such conditions as will ensure that the sensation brings a certain body part forward for consciousness. The exact nature of those further conditions will emerge in the discussion which now follows in sections 5–6. 5. causal consider ations (a) The significance of the exceptional phenomena One might think that one could determine the place of a sensation altogether unproblematically. One might readily suppose that it has merely to seem to one that a given sensation lies in a certain place in one’s body, whereupon the place in question will simultaneously automatically also be – the place of the cause – the place one would point to – the place one discovers by running a finger tip through a continuity of sensations to the sensation itself – etc. And this is indeed the norm. Nevertheless, a variety of exceptional phenomena have just shown, in demonstrating that these tests can yield divergent results, that the place of the sensation cannot as such be any of these things. Those special phenomena (suitably labelled with appropriate tags for ease of reference, and augmented a little) are the following: (i) ‘Phantom limb’ (in which the brain-located sensation unsuccessfully aspires towards a (non-existent) projective location). (ii) ‘Minor dental confusion’ (in which tracing/tapping discloses minor error in immediate seemings). (iii) ‘Sensory blur’ (in which tracing/tapping discloses minor ignorance in immediate seemings, say concerning the precise location of a tickle on the chest).

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(iv) ‘Unmapped promontories’ (in which a sensation, let us say at the tip of a novel graft, comes seemingly as on the part supporting the graft). (v) ‘Inner-outer referral ’ (in which a cause in an unmapped interior part generates a sensation elsewhere on a mapped body surface). (vi) ‘Outer-outer referral ’ (in which a cause at an outer mapped point generates a sensation elsewhere on a mapped body surface). (vii) ‘Cross-patchwork’ (in which a body part and its neurological links are transplanted intact onto another bodily site, leading to grossly erroneous seemings). These unusual phenomena to a degree undermine the natural force both of simple causal considerations, of immediate seemings, and of the apparent position of the sensation in a quasi-sense-field. The question then arises: how is it that we can usually manage to decisively settle the position of the sensation in such exceptional situations? Surely if we could uncover the principles determining our answers, we must come much closer to discovering the elusive criterial formula that is the goal of this discussion. As the investigation of illness has frequently disclosed the mechanisms normally and silently operative in health, so it may be here. (b) Visual analogues and the importance of causal considerations (1) The sense of sight gives us a lead. For visual analogues exist of some of these exceptional phenomena, notably of (iv) (vi) (vii) (above), and in such visual situations it is easier to discover how it is that we manage to know that a particular sensation may be projectively located on a particular material object ‘receiver’. Thus, the following visual analogues are worthy of commentary: (iv) Of ‘unmapped promontories’ (the visual analogue here is, veridical visual perception of objects that is co-present with depth illusions, e.g. the night sky – ‘the floor of heaven’). (vi) Of ‘outer-outer referral’ (the visual analogue here is: if it were the case that whenever light of wave length λ1 –λ2 impinged at point p1 on the retina, then sensation s occurred at some p2 part of the visual field, whereas all other wave lengths impinging at p1 caused sensations at the suitably corresponding p1 part of the visual field). (vii) Of ‘cross patchwork’ (the analogue is, transplanting sectors of the retina and thereby systematically transplanting the sensuous contents of the visual field). (2) We shall see how it is that, despite the difficulties posed by some of these situations, we are nonetheless capable of decisively ensuring that and onto

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what projection has taken place. In this way the fundamental importance of causal considerations will emerge. Then let us begin with Situation (vii) (‘cross patchwork’), for it is particularly instructive in this regard. We shall suppose that a scene finds sensuous reflection in a visual field before and after a series of transplants of sectors of the retina, as represented in Fig. 6. A

B

C

D

1 2

B in the retina is re-organised into

3 4

A

D

C

4 2 1 3

so that the scene A

B

C

1 2

D

B

re-appears as

3 4

A

D

C

4 2 1 3

Fig. 6

Alternatively, we shall suppose that two green trees A and B are side by side, and that a transplant-interchange of two very small sectors of the retina, x and y , takes place, such that corresponding items in the environment, x and y, appear in each other’s place in the visual field, as represented in Fig. 7. Thus, it will erroneously seem to the subject that leaf y is a part of tree A and leaf x a part of tree B. z x o o

y o

A

B

re-appears as

z y o o

x o

A

B

Fig. 7

Now seemings (‘appearances’) lose some but not all of their force here. For example, in Fig. 7 the existence of a green visual sensation at y, and its adjacence to another sensation at z, is necessarily as it seems in optimum conditions of consciousness, for visual sensations are psychologistically given and in a spatial system that is likewise immediately given; on the other hand seemings are fallible, first as to whether or not the visual sensations

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projectively ‘land’, second concerning the spatial relations of their ‘receivers’. Nevertheless, we can yet manage to identify, in this and much more disorganised visual fields, which physical items receive the projections of which sensuous patch in the visual field. Thus, we can in the first of these two ‘cross-patchwork’ situations tell that the transplanted visual sensation in the novel sector C1 still projects successfully onto the top of the tree. That is, projects still onto the tree itself, exactly as does x in the second situation project onto the tree A both before and after retinal disorganisation – and in despite of seeming to project onto tree B. (For the problem of locating a visual sensation on a physical object amounts to identifying, not the whole object that might come to awareness if one notices the sensation, but the whole object that is such that it harbours a part that is such that in noticing that sensation one notices that part.) Then the place of the projects is given in Fig. 8. Initially A

1

B C D

2 3 Cs 4

Visible physical items

Visual field of visual sensations Later 4

B

A

D C

2 1 Cs

3

Fig. 8

Now while appearances are still a guide in the latter ‘cross-patchwork’ situation, they are decidedly fallible witnesses. Thus, in region B1–B3 one seems to see the shape

but does not; and yet one does see shapes

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and . This is because causal regularities are preserved in one case (viz. all silhouettes entering B1 are realities, and likewise in the case of B3) but not in the other case (viz. it is not true that all silhouettes entering the region B1–B3 are realities). We note that some units are presented to view whole, while some are dismembered; that lights and colours and smallish spatial relations tend to be preserved, while large-scale spatial relations have grown invisible. Thus, as the straightness of a stick in water is not perceived as bent, any more than the blueness of a sky can be perceived – albeit illusorily – as red, so it is with large-scale spatial relations in this scene. Yet what is of fundamental importance is, that all these departures from the norm are regular departures. They are no more serious embarrassments to the rule of law, than are mirrors or prismatic phenomena serious counterexamples to the Principle of the Rectilinear Propagation of Light. Then as the Rectilinear Propagation of Light underlies mirror phenomena, so a comparable law underlies these visual projections. Like mirrors and prisms these phenomena are merely systematic departures from a norm. As not everything lies in the direction given by light beams reflected by it, since – so here. Yet – give or take those beams may follow paths like a few complications – light travels in straight lines. (3) Then how do we tell which visual sensation projects, and whether at all, onto which visible physical item? The above exceptional phenomena remind us that mere appearances cannot ever decisively settle the matter. After all, it is not immediately let alone mentalistically immediately given that a visual sensation does successfully project onto anything at all; and even if it were, so that the subject incorrigibly knew of the sensation that it projected onto ‘that’ visible spot, that is a propositiion of zero designatory content, comparable to the zero empirical content of the sudden dizzifying insight given to a self-conscious subject to the effect that ‘I am I’! Instead, we proceed as follows. We line up point sensation and corresponding point in physical space by managing to trace a regular causal link between the two. We make use of the fact that if the projection is to succeed the ‘receiver’ must be perceived, and utilise the further fact that perceptual causal relations link outer cause with sensation effect via bona fide mechanism. Thus, we manage to systematically correlate sensuous colour and movement at that (C1) part of the visual field with visible colour and movement lying in the required direction in physical space. Thereby we establish the existence of a mechanistic connection, and put ourselves in a position to know that the link between the greenness of

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that part of the tree, and the sensation situated in region C1, was causal perceptual. These nomic physical causal considerations criterially ensure the existence of, and fix the identity of, the recipient of the projection. They decisively outweigh the force of certain seemings. And yet, as we have already had occasion to observe, the existence of purely physical causal criteria can and must peacefully co-exist with absolutely binding constraints cast in terms of seemings. We shall see that a very similiar situation obtains in the case of the location of bodily sensations. (c) The regular links between position-of-cause-of-bodily-sensation; seeming-projective-position-of-sensation; actual-projective-position – in the three main anomalous situations for bodily sensations (1) We pass from considering the projective locating of the properties of visual sensations on physical objects in the physical world, to the problem of locating bodily sensations on parts of the body of their owner. We have seen that none of the usual tests, viz. place of cause, of immediate seeming, apparent position within a possible continuum of simultaneous sensations, are of criterial import. On the other hand, we have managed to assemble a completely general, and in itself altogether useless, rendering of‘the location of a bodily sensation’. Namely: it is the limited sector of the body that as such comes forward for awareness in a bodily sensation. And I describe this valid enough general recipe as useless, simply because it provides us with no method for decisively determining which place or even whether or not any place is thus coming forward for consciousness. This I must still discover. The visual situation once again provides a lead. However, in order to follow that up I must consider in a little more detail the three most interesting ‘complicating situations’ for bodily sensations, since it was they above all that undermined the overriding force of the usual familiar tests. I mean the situations I dubbed ‘cross-patchwork’, ‘inner–outer referral’, ‘outer–outer referral’. I shall consider these situations in turn, and I will begin by setting next to them for comparison the normal situation. In discussing those four situations, I employ diagrams in which are represented the points (B1 , B2 ) at which the brain links to the relevant neurological circuits; together with the neurological circuits that link the brain to the bodily sites (p1 , p2 ) that are the places of the (superficial) causes of the sensation and generally also (projectively) of the sensations themselves; and finally the positions (p3 , p4 ) of physically deeper intervening causes of the sensation, midway between the superficial causal sites (p1 , p2 ) and the brain.

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B1

B2

p4

p3

p1

p2

(A) Normality In Fig. 9, stimulus at p1 , via deeper effect at p3 , so affects the brain at B1 that a sensation both seems projectively to be at p1 (i.e. S(p1 ) – as we shall call it), and is projectively at p1 (i.e. P(p1 )). The same relation holds between stimulus at p2 and a sensation felt at p2 .

Fig. 9

Then the following regularities, linking mere superficial bodily causes with both seeming and actual projective site of the sensation, hold in this case. And we should note that, since the cause is merely superficial, there is no chance that these two regularities will have law-like force. The regularities are as follows. C(ause at) (p1 ) ↔ S(eems to be at) (p1 ) ↔ P(osition at) (p1 ) C(p2 ) ↔ S(p2 ) ↔ P(p2 ).

B1

B2

p3

p4

p1

p2

Fig. 10

(B) Cross-patchwork In Fig. 10, stimulus at p2 , via a deeper effect at p3 , affects the brain at B1 , such that a sensation seems to be at p1 and is in fact at p2 . And stimulus at p1 , via a deeper effect at p4 , causes a sensation that seems to be at p2 and is at p1 .

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Then the following regularities obtain: C(p2 ) ↔ S(p1 ) ↔ P(p2 ) C(p1 ) ↔ S(p2 ) ↔ P(p1 ).

B1

B2

p3

p4

p1

p2

(C) Inner–outer referral In Fig. 11, stimulus at interior point p2 , via a deep effect at p3 , affects the brain at B1 , such that a sensation both seems to be and is at the exterior point p1 . And stimulus at the exterior point p1 does the same.

Fig. 11

Then the following regularities obtain: C(p1 V p2 ) ↔ S(p1 ) ↔ P(p1 )

B1

(and there is nothing that is S(p2 ) or P(p2 )).

B2

p3

p1

p4

p2

Fig. 12

(D) Outer–outer referral This phenomenon (see Fig. 12) is only possible if we suppose that some types of stimulus at p2 cause a corresponding type of sensation at p1 , and that the other types of stimulus at p2 cause a corresponding type of sensation at p2 . Meanwhile all types of stimulus at p1 cause their corresponding sensation at p1 .

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Then the following regularities obtain: C(at p1 of type TαV at p2 of type Tα) ↔ S(p1 , Tα) ↔ P(p1 , Tα) C(p1 , all other types Tβ) ↔ S(p1 , Tβ) ↔ P(p1 , Tβ) C(p2 , Tβ) ↔ S(p2 , Tβ) ↔ P(p2 , Tβ)

(d) Explaining these laws (1) As the behaviour of light in relation to prisms and mirrors is explicable, and utilises the Principle of the Rectilinear Propagation of Light as an explanatory aid, so roughly speaking it is here. Thus, I shall in what follows first of all write down the several (superficial) rules stated above, and I will then replace each rule by a (deeper and) more binding rule that can be invoked in explanation of the former rule. This deeper rule will make mention of causally relevant phenomena occurring at physically deeper levels than those involved in the first rule: that is, occurring at the deeper points p3 and p4 . But it will in addition adopt a maximally cautious statement of the site of the sensation: for it also involves mention of seemings which take as their object the minimal possible body-point target (which I shall symbolise as S ), as well as a corresponding minimal statement of the actual position (symbolised as P ). Thus, instead of singling out sensations as set in determinate limbs like arms or legs, they are here picked out as merely at points that happen to be in such limbs. (A) Normality. The original regularities were as follows: C(p1 ) ↔ S(p1 ) ↔ P(p1 ),

These now give way to the following regularities cast in terms of p3 and S and P : C(p3 ) ↔ S (p1 ) ↔ P (p1 ).

(B) Cross-patchwork. The original regularities were: C(p2 ) ↔ S(p1 ) ↔ P(p2 ) and C(p1 ) ↔ S(p2 ) ↔ P(p1 ).

These now give way to:

C(p3 ) ↔ S (p2 ) ↔ P (p1 ) and C(p4 ) ↔ S (p1 ) ↔ P (p1 ),

(which so to say rights the wrongs promulgated by cross-patchwork). (C) Inner-outer referral. The original regularities were: C(p1 v p2 ) ↔ S(p1 ) ↔ P(p1 ).

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These now give way to: C(p3 ) ↔ S (p1 ) P (p1 ).

(D) Outer-outer referral. The original regularities were: C(at p1 of type TαV at p2 of type Tα) ↔ S(p1 , Tα), and C(p1 , Tβ) ↔ S(p1 , Tβ) ↔ P(p1 , Tβ) and C(p2 , Tβ) ↔ S(p2 , Tβ) ↔ P(p2 , Tβ).

These give way to: C(p3 , Tα V Tβ) ↔ S (p1 ) ↔ P (p1 ), and C(p4 , Tβ) ↔ S (p2 , Tβ) ↔ P (p2 , Tβ).

That is, in effect to:

C(p3 ) ↔ S (p1 ) ↔ P (p1 ), and C(p4 , Tβ) ↔ S (p2 , Tβ) ↔ P (p2 , Tβ).

(2) In short, C(p3 ) ↔ S (p1 ) ↔ P (p1 ), and this approximates to true law as p3 approximates to the deepest possible or ultimate bodily cause of the sensation and P singles out a mere ungarnished point. And so we explain these three (regular) departures from a regular norm, by showing them to be generated by one nomic schema. The place of a bodily sensation is the smallest-scale point-part its deepest or ultimate physical cause standardly causes it to appear at. Now this is something more than a mere regularity, or even causal law. It is a logical necessity. An interesting minor complication. It stems from the fact that sensations are endowed with a spatial character of their own. Thus, if we engaged in cross-patchwork in which we transported (say) hand-skin, and were simultaneously to generate via events in the spinal cord (say) a dull ache that seems to be in the hand, then despite the cross-patchwork the ache would project onto the hand; whereas if we similarly generated a tickle that seemed to be on the hand, that sensation would be located on the hand skin and hence not on the hand (which is elsewhere). This is because aches are first and foremost of sides and never of surfaces, whereas tickles are first of all of surfaces and only secondly and derivatively thereby of sides. In other words, sensations can of necessity project only onto the befitting corresponding receiver. Therefore while the bodily sensation is always putatively projected, it as such is directed only onto a minimal body part of befitting kind; and if one is aware of that befitting and minimal part, then the sensation before all else projects onto it and only derivatively onto less minimal parts. For example: a tickle seems to be on the back of the hand, at the end of the

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arm, half way up the body; but before all else it is set on that item that plays the vital role of incarnating a surface in the mode of a thing, viz. the skin. Then what in the vastly familiar projective sense is ‘the place of a bodily sensation’? We know that it is the real part of the body at which it is experienced to be. But which part is that? Well, we know that it is the part of the body that the sensation as such brings forward for consciousness. But what are the criteria of being such a body part? It has emerged that these can be stated in causal terms. Thus, the projective site of a bodily sensation s is that presently real body point-part P that is such that the deepest bodily cause C of sensation s normally causes a sensation at P, thanks to the existence of a neurological link between C and P; and that end-point-part P is of the befitting kind corresponding to the type of the sensation s. And so we can see that in the final analysis the phenomenon of projection rests upon the foundation of a regular neurologically founded connection between the deepest physical cause of the sensation and its projective site. But we shall soon see how, on pain of circularity, that in turn rests on a regular link between deep physical causes and the character of one’s experience. 6 . a brief r e´ sum e´ of chapt ers 5 and 6 Here I halt the discussion. And I shall now in the final part of the present chapter, and before taking up the discussion again in chapter 7, summarise and a little embellish the conclusions reached in the course of this and the last chapter. First, in section (A) (below) a comment on the phenomenon of ‘the given’ in relation to one’s own body here-and-now; then in (B) a summary of some of the more general conclusions concerning the location of sensations; to be followed in (C) by a few comments on the a priori constraints upon bodily experience; and finally (D) a brief coda. (A) The ‘given’ (1) I began this entire discussion in chapter 5 at the beginning of Part II by asking: What is the immediate object of the bodily will? That is: what entity does the bodily will first and before all else reach out for and activate? Whatever it may be, it must be a something of which the subject is aware. For bodily willing rests on a foundation that is at least partly

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epistemological. For it seems clear that the bodily will can be immediately directed only towards that which is given to awareness. More, only that which is given to awareness in the special primitive mode that I dubbed ‘immediate presence’, which is in fact that of proprioceptive perception. Then what can we say about ‘immediate presence’? We know that two awarenesses that are necessary conditions of intentional bodily action occur when proprioceptive perception occurs. Namely: an awareness of the sheer presence of, and in addition of some of the spatial properties of the bodily object of the will. And we know further that these two important awarenesses in some way owe their existence to bodily sensation. Then this relation through ‘feel’ became the prime theme of the inquiry. Thus, how exactly does bodily sensation accomplish the feat of making both limb and such spatial properties as the posture and dynamics of the limb ‘immediately present’ to its owner? The whole question of the immediate object of the bodily will boils down to this very difficult single question. Then let me at this point elaborate a little on this issue. It is clear that several items of epistemological data are available to an agent subject, and that these few items are intimately linked. To wit: ‘feel’, body-part-that-harbours-‘feel’, body-relative-position-ofharbouring-limb. These several items are elements of one fundamental epistemological edifice. Then how do those items relate to one another? In particular, what are the epistemological priorities? What is primary for awareness and what secondary? In a word, what is ‘given’? Now since removal of ‘feel’ extinguishes limb awareness, and ‘feel’ is something of which we are immediately aware, the epistemological edifice that encompasses limb awareness must start from a ‘given’ that at the very least includes ‘feel’. But how do these two latter elements relate? For example: how does awareness of limb posture relate to the ‘feel’ whose removal would extinguish it? Well, it seems clear that it cannot be through the quale of these ‘given’ sensations, since right/left distinctions need be matched by no qualitative distinctions. Then since it is not derived from the quality of the ‘feel’ that makes it possible, what more natural than to suppose that it is through the spatial layout of the diffused array of whatever slight feelings (one presumes) determine the ‘feel’ that we normally attribute to our (non-anaesthetised) limbs? After all, this is precisely the kind of situation that obtains in the case of the other great space-informative sense, viz. sight. In short, it is extremely easy to suppose that the ‘given’ in relation to body space and presence consists exclusively of bodily sensations and their layout in space.

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Nevertheless, this theory faces insuperable difficulties. For whereas visual sensations can be experienced completely a-interpretatively, as when we characterise the after-image had with closed eyes as ‘a patch of green on a violet ground’, a bodily sensation is necessarily experienced as set in a bodily part of greater or lesser determinacy, just as a moving bodily sensation must be experienced as change in the body part that harbours a single persisting sensation. (2) Then is limb posture ‘given’ along with bodily sensations and their body-relative position? Naturally, it depends upon the sense we adopt for ‘the given’. Then the completely traditional sense that I chose, which takes its cue from the visual sense-datum, is such that ‘the given’ in some domain for some mind at some time consists in the items of which one is absolutely immediately aware which are such that through them we come to be aware of all that is presently experienced in the domain under consideration. Then clearly ‘feel’ must be ‘given’ in relation to the body; indeed, it must be what we have called ‘psychologistically given’, seeing that one’s epistemological relation to it is psychologistically immediate. But is limb posture also ‘given’? Well, it cannot be ‘psychologistically given’, first because it is not a psychological phenomenon; second because it is grossly corrigible in optimum conditions of consciousness; and third, and very interestingly, because awareness of limb posture is caused by awareness of ‘feel’ ! And yet there can be no doubt that, on the traditional reading of the expression ‘the given’ that I have adopted, limb posture joins ‘feel’ and the body-relative whereabouts of any particular ‘feel’, as elements of the ‘given’. To be sure, there is an element of paradox here. Thus, as visual sensations cause an impression that is an awareness of themselves as presenting to view a determinate environment – so that both the visual sensations and the environment that sustains such ‘projectiles’ are at one stroke given as objects to consciousness – so roughly it is with ‘body sense’. Bodily sensations cause an awareness of themselves as set in a specific position in a determinately postured limb, and simultaneously those same sensations cause awareness of the very limb in which they themselves come as seemingly set! Accordingly, bodily sensation rates no more as ‘given’ than do either the limited point-part in which it is set, or the entire limb or body part that harbours that limited part. Despite the causal pre-eminence of the sensation, both are equally ‘given’. Now it was in this way that we reached the conclusion that the ‘given’, whether it be in part psychological or not, was as rich as: ‘feel’, body-part-that-harbours-‘feel’, body-relative-position-of-harbouring-part;

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no element of this unitary whole having epistemological priority over any other. (B) The location of sensation (1) To repeat: even though awareness of bodily sensation causes awareness of the body, yet because the body provides the necessary setting for sensation, both must be equi-‘given’. Accordingly, the ‘given’ in relation to the body must consist of: ‘feel’, body-part-harbouring-‘feel’, body-relative-positionof-that-part. Then while the first and last of these three concepts are clear enough, it has emerged that the second is not. For once we recognise, with a nudge or two from Physicalism, that we are not here speaking of the literal spatial position of the sensation, it becomes an important and unanswered question just what this element of the ‘given’ consists in. To grasp that the sensation is literally in the brain, is so to say to ‘set the cat among the pigeons’ on this issue: our ignorance, or worse our sheer confusion, is put on display. Indeed, it is precisely this confusion – since we tend inappropriately to model bodily locatings upon visual locatings – that leads us to misinterpret the fact that ‘feel’ causes awareness of body space, as reason for supposing that the bodily ‘given’ consists exclusively of ‘feels’ and their spatial layout. In any case, it seems that the unitary ‘given’ that includes the vitally important spatial properties of the body which permit the bodily will to range over the body, contains an essential element that we simply do not understand. Then while those latter bodily spatial properties are of prime importance so far as the bodily will is concerned, there is a good reason why we should come to understand this other more obscure element of the ‘given’. That is, unravel the standard sense of ‘the location of bodily sensation’; which is to say, discover the criteria for a bodily sensation’s having some particular position p. For while these criterial facts and phenomena do not provide an epistemological foundation for such a ‘given’, they accomplish something else that is of considerable importance. Thus, discovering the criterial requirements for a sensation’s being at some point p, is discovering the conditions of its being at p, which is discovering the facts and phenomena that are actually involved in its being at p. But more. Because a sensation cannot manage projectively to be at a place p without the spatial layout of the ‘receiving’ body being to a degree ‘immediately present’, and therefore without the obtaining of the aforementioned unitary ‘given’, discovering the criteria of a sensation’s being

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at p is discovering what makes possible the unitary ‘given’ and hence also the ‘immediate presence’ of body space. Therefore while nothing epistemologically explains the epistemological triad: ‘feel’, part-that-harbours-‘feel’, body-relative-position-of-latter, certain conditions must criterially be met if both the triad and any one of its constituent elements are to obtain. Therefore discovering the criteria of the location of a bodily sensation, proves to have the wider significance of revealing how it is that the bodily will comes to have its object given to it. (2) What are these criterial requirements? They proved in the first place to be causal. Thus, for a sensation to project onto some place p in a limb L, requires that the deepest bodily cause of the sensation be the deepest cause of sensations that normally seem to their owner to be at that place p. And yet the fact that there exist decisive causal criteria for such a locating, must not be overinterpreted – as if we had in this way somehow succeeded in short-circuiting the mind out of the picture! – as if the word ‘cause’ was a licence for all manner of reductionisms! There is no way in which experiential factors can be deleted from our concept of ‘the location of a bodily sensation’. For irrespective of projectively ‘landing’, bodily sensations must be experienced in a certain way. As we shall see in (C)(below), they must be experienced as taking up a determinate position on a determinately sized and shaped body, and in addition experienced as standing to one another in such relations of proximity and remoteness as would be consistent with their doing so. And so it is not as if causal considerations had managed to ‘out-trump’ experiential ones, as if we had surfaced to a purely scientific plateau where subjectivity gives way competely to hard scientific fact. The causal test must fit intelligibly into a total picture of the animal mind at a certain time, wherein both experience of the body and the body itself have their equally vital part to play. For the above causal criterion involved a sensation’s seeming to be at some part of its owner’s body; and this in turn depends upon the satisfaction of two extremely interesting necessary conditions which are experiential in character.

(C) Sense fields and the seeming body (1) Those additional two necessary conditions prove to depend upon the experiential concepts of a sense field and of the seeming body. Let me here briefly explain what precisely those conditions are and how one might

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become aware of them. Now throughout this discussion I have been struggling against the inclination to postulate the existence of a bodily sense field, even as I simultaneously attempted to conserve something that bears a resemblance to a sense field. What can that something be? The sense of sight here as elsewhere provides a valuable lead. Thus, two necessary conditions, not of mere visual experience, but of visual perception proper, which is to say the veridical visual noticing of an X as an X, are these. The visual sensation that manages to project onto the environment, while necessarily satisfying certain bodily causal requirements, must simultaneously have its place in an actual or possible sense field; and it must in addition project onto a world – first of which the subject is aware (for the unconscious cannot visually perceive) – and secondly, if we are speaking of an example of perception proper, it must ‘land’ in a world of whose ‘look’ the subject is to a degree apprised. And so it is in the case of the body (whose role in bodily awareness is analogous to that of the world in visual perception). Two close analogies exist here between sight and ‘body sense’. First, even though bodily sensations cannot occur in a sense field, those sensations that ‘land’ must, through ‘landing’ on a real surface, stand in the spatial relations (‘next to’, ‘farther off than’, etc.) that hold between the elements of a sense field – and a spatially continuous myriad of such sensations is at least akin to a sense field. The second analogy with sight is this: that just as an awareness of the world, being nothing else than the state of wakeful consciousness in the rational, taken in conjunction with an awareness of the look of some of the world’s contents, is a necessary condition of veridical perception proper, so it seems is an awareness of the body together with some awareness of its general spatial traits a necessary condition of projecting a bodily sensation onto the body. That is, the possession of a kind of internal picture, of a ‘body image’: which is to say, the continuous (though necessarily inexperienceable) seeming presence of a spatially determinate body endowed with sides and bounded by a spatially determinate skin surface. So much for the analogies with sight. Through them we can now state the experiential constraints to which the bodily causal criterion of the location of sensation must submit. These are, not that the sensation must take up its position and ‘land’ on a body of whose shape one is apprised, but that it must be given to consciousness as if it matched the above two visual analogies. Thus, the sensation must in the first place come to consciousness as determinately located amidst an actual or merely potential array of sensations that comprise a continuum that is at least akin to a sense field; and it must in the second place be given as determinately located

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on/against/in the sensitive surface of a spatially determinate body. Then it is of the latter of these two phenomena, which is the internalisation of an epistemological norm, that I wish here briefly to speak. For I shall at this point in this summary briefly comment on the phenomenon of ‘seeming body’. (2) Two very interesting phenomena help in the characterisation of this internal framework. For ease of reference I shall dub them ‘plenitude’ and ‘adherence’, beginning with ‘plenitude’. Thus, just as the visual field, being at most 360◦ in extent and populated by minima visibilia, can contain only a finite quantity of sensuous material, so both actual and merely seeming body can sustain no more than a limited quotum of any sensation kind. While bodily sensations putatively project onto the body, only a limited quantity can even putatively ‘land’ – so only a limited quantity can exist! Bodily sensations are bounded in extent. They cannot just float on indefinitely through space like a shapeless fog. A kind of plenitude eventually occurs. Eventually ‘the theatre is full’ ‘all seats occupied’ ‘on all places on the body’, for they are then seemingly set ‘all over’ (as we very interestingly express it). As we increase – not the intensity, but the extent – of bodily sensation, and quite irrespective of the presence or not of the body!, necessarily this phenomenon of ‘filling’ or ‘plenitude’ occurs. Now this is a matter of some interest. That after a time no more (say) sensations of contact even in principle are possible – irrespective of the presence or not of the body (which proves it is not directly due to the limited surface area of the body). It is like the completion of a finite system, the last sensation slotting into place rather as does z at the end of the alphabet. A finite internal system! Thus, ‘plenitude’ shows that a finite bounded psychological framework exists that is ready to receive absolutely any bodily sensation anywhere anytime. The companion phenomenon of ‘adherence’ (so-called) amounts to this: that if (say) a ‘plenitude’ of (say) sensations of contact occurs, then of necessity it locks onto the surface of the seeming body; for all bodily sensations must be given as ‘landing’ or ‘adhering’ to the outside (or inner side, e.g. mouth-side) of the spatially determinate body landscape. Now the phenomenon of ‘plenitude’ occurs in seeing, since the visual field likewise can store so much and no more sensuous material, but because visual sensations are not as such given as projecting – which is evident if one thinks of seeing with closed eyes – ‘adherence’ does not; and this constitutes a radical break between sight and ‘body sense’. But ‘adherence’ has

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an additional significance that is I think even more important, and that is in any case closer to my purposes. Thus, we know that bodily sensations are given as set on/against/within a convoluting surface, which suggests the existence of a 2D 3D analogue of the visual field, and ‘plenitude’ might seem to confirm this in so far as it suggests the existence of a bounded ‘receiving’ psychological surface. But ‘adherence’, even though it confirms the reality of a seeming surface, first of all does so by binding it to the seeming body, and secondly thereby demonstrates that it is not a separate autonomous entity but no more than a spatial determination of the seeming body. Then through showing that bodily sensations are not set in a system that intervenes between us and the seeming body, ‘adherence’ demonstrates the peculiar immediacy of the normal epistemological relation to the body. (3) So much for a brief comment on the topic of the seeming or internalised body, of which I shall have a great deal more to say in chapters 7 and 8. Now having spelled out the bodily causal criterion of bodily sensation location, together with the two experiential constraints that it must meet, I find myself in a position to answer the fundamental question that prompted this entire search for a unified statement. Namely: what are, not the epistemological conditions of the will’s having its bodily object given to it, but the necessary and indeed constitutive conditions of such a state of affairs? If a veridical internal ‘image’ of the body exists; together with the obtaining of certain requisite causal regularities linking stimuli at the deepest cerebral input points with sensations given seemingly at a point on the ‘imaged’ body; then the ground is laid for ‘body sense’. Whereupon if sufficient stimuli then occur as to generate such sensations as constitute aesthesia in a limb, then there must occur the unitary ‘given’ of ‘feel’, partthat-sustains-‘feel’, body-relative-position-of-latter. It is in this way that body space becomes ‘immediately present’. These are the vitally important factors that enable the body and its posture and dynamics to be ‘immediately present’ – and thereby smooth the way for the bodily will. Therefore to uncover the criteria of the location of a bodily sensation must be to discover both what it is for a sensation to have a location and the criterial and causal conditions for the ‘immediate presence’ of body space. Then since the latter question had become our fundamental theme, that of the criteria of the location of a bodily sensation also became, so to say in a more concrete and particular manner, likewise the central theme.

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Accordingly, I conclude this summary with a brief statement of those criteria, a statement in which are brought together the several aspects of the phenomenon. (D) Coda: a unified statement of the criteria for the location of sensation The following have emerged as necessary conditions of projecting a bodily sensation s onto the body at some presently existing body point-part p. (1) Causation. There must exist a causal regularity linking the originative phenomena which are situated at p, both with phenomena of the type of the deepest bodily cause of this sensation s, and with such a sensation’s seeming to be at the p-part, under its minimal description, of a determinately shaped (etc.) body. (2) Seemings. And sensation s must come to consciousness as determinately located at the p-part, under its minimal description, of the spatially determinate seeming body. (3) Sense fields. And sensation s must in principle be locatable amidst a potential ‘plenitude’ of ‘adhering’ sensations that at least seem to stand to one another in the spatial relations that hold between the parts of a sense field. Now these are essential features of the situation that prevails when a bodily sensation s projects onto some part p of the body; and bearing in mind that (1) guarantees (2), and both guarantee (3), it is clear that they form a unified whole. Then the phenomenon of successful projection is nothing but the realisation of these unified requirements. And since ‘feel’ makes ‘immediately present’ the existence and spatial properties of the body, these must likewise be necessary conditions of the latter; so that it is in such a manner that there comes to be such a rich unitary ‘given’ as: ‘feel’, body-part-thatharbours-‘feel’, body-relative-position-of-latter; and in such a manner that the bodily will has its immediate object given it. Then since we have explicated the very sense of ‘location of a bodily sensation’ in terms of the concept of body-image, it looks very much as if this concept, far from being constituted out of some supposedly more fundamental concept of particular bodily seemings, let us say through assembling a multifarious array of point seemings in a space of the mind, is an essential and indeed ultimate or irreducible element of mind-to-body epistemology. Just as one does not arrive at the concept of The World through assembling in one’s mind a multifarious array of such items as space and time and matter, so one does not arrive at the

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state of possessing a body-image through assembling an array of particular bodily seemings. It would be nearer the truth to say, that the proper order of priorities is precisely the reverse. In any case, the phenomenon of bodyimage looks as if it must be an original and irreducible element of animal existence.

chapter 7

The body-image (1): myth and reality

An unexplained concept has appeared in the discussion of the mind-tobody epistemological relation: that of body-image. This is an extremely important and somewhat neglected element in any adequate theory of the epistemological relation of mind to body. Without it, much that we take for granted remains fundamentally unintelligible, and therefore in a certain sense much that we assume we ought not to assume until we have fashioned an acceptable theory of the body-image. That is, assembled the main features of a viable concept that has application in the world. It is a concept that has its parallels in sense-perception. And yet we shall see that these are on the whole misleading. For the concept of body-image is hot to handle. It is a deeply confusing concept. For this reason I begin this discussion by spelling out in detail an extreme and thought-disturbing myth concerning the body-image that emerged in the course of the previous two chapters. But to do so I must first give a brief summary of one or two of the main findings of those chapters. 1. the unconscious my thology of t he body-image (a) Recapitulation I return to the relation holding between a man and his limbs. Thus, while my gall-bladder is a part of me that I know exists, my leg is that and more. For it is ‘immediately present’, and given from-outside-onto-side-and-surface (onto flank and skin, so to say). I stand here in a directional relation of immediate awareness to an inessential part of me from which I am not distinct. Now it is clear that the obtaining of such an intuitional awareness of a limb is a necessary condition of willing change in the limb. For how else would the will know where to ‘get a grip’? Then a variety of mythical accounts of this epistemological relation pressed forward for consideration. For example: in section 4 of chapter 5 244

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we encountered – and rejected – albeit with little argument – an extreme Cartesian-ish epistemological myth. This theory supposes our inner life to be such as one might expect were we extensionless locationless soul substances – whereupon the problem would arise of ‘how to give the soul a chance of feeling its body’ (as Merleau-Ponty ironically expressed it). Thus, suppose an ant nips the toe part of the body-thing and a pain occurs. This pain puts one in epistemological contact with the toe-thing. But how does it do so? And of what kind is that epistemological contact? According to this theory the sensation is given to one exactly as one would assume were it to be a locationless event in an unextended soul-entity. That is, as thought or mental image are given.1 For the pain is in itself said to be given purely a-spatially. The basic epistemological datum here is supposedly a sheer quale – even though mind and sensation are such that the latter is projected outwards (somewhat as mental factors like association cause us to project directionless sounds like diffused hummings onto likely sources like television sets) – ‘landing’ for whatever reason on the toe. Then this account is very naturally embellished with the further distinct thesis, that the basis of the projection lies in the quale. That is, that there exist toe-ish pains and right-toe-ish pains, etc. This last is evidently false. And it seems that the supposition that the sensation is spacelessly ‘given’ is a confused registering of the fact that the sensation is not in the toe, the place to which experience assigns it, but in the one organ that the subject cannot of necessity shed, viz. the organ of Mentality. For the facts are, that the sensation is not in the toe, is in the brain, the one essential organ, and yet necessarily is given to consciousness as at some, possibly inessential, body part of other. I say ‘possibly’, for it is not a priori that the foot is not the organ of Mentality; so that it is conceivable that a sensation might have been projected from foot onto foot! Why not? Our concept of projection can accommodate this freak possibility. After all, an insane paranoid might project his own murderousness onto the being that he sees creeping stealthily and menacingly towards him – in a mirror! Something like this happens with headaches. 1

For to what place, or even in what direction, would one point if asked to point at or even towards a mental image? The answer is, to no place or direction. Then this must be why it has sometimes been thought that mental events, which lie in time, do not occupy space. What it rather shows is that they neither need to be, nor in most cases could ever manage to be, projected onto anything or even in a direction. While it is a necessity that a bodily sensation is experienced as at some body place, it is equally necessary that thoughts are not, and that the familiar brand of mental images are not. But as we earlier observed: being-experienced-at is one thing, being-at is another.

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(1) But the most compelling and interesting myth was that briefly elaborated in chapter 5, section 3(b) (‘Kinaesthetic sensations’). It comes into being via the following line of thought. We are aware of our bodies in a fallible non-mentalistic relation. And, since this awareness departs when sensation departs, this non-mentalistic awareness must be, not merely intuitional, but sensuous intuitional. And from outside-onto-side-and-surface. Then precisely what information is conveyed to the subject in this directional relation? Of what is he aware? Not the limb’s colour. Certainly its temperature. Most important of all: its very presence. And almost as important: its position, posture, movement; and all relative to the body. In sum: we stand in a fallible non-mentalistic directional sensuous-intuitional relation, in which the main information that is conveyed is of the presence and body-relative spatial properties of the limb at that moment. So we naturally come to feel that space and sensation come first, and intuition of limb and limb-space come after. It almost seems as if, with an internal eye that looks from outside across the body through feeling, we stand in a quasi-visual relation to the limb. As if we were provided with an internal sense photograph of the limb! Then it will be into such an immediately presented spatialised sensuous totality that we slot our bodily sensations. It will act as a differentiating framework, a kind of coordinate system, into which the sensations are fitted. As time is the formal medium through which the stream of consciousness breaks into parts, this will be the formal medium wherein the bodily sensations of each moment fly apart and are distinguished one from another. (2) Then the extreme myth that these facts and speculations naturally suggest, takes the following form. The ‘feel’ all over one’s body surface is made up of sensations. And all these sensations and their relative positions are immediately given. Seemingly constituting a ‘ghost limb’. Almost like a myriad of minuscule stars in the Milky Way. Spatially arrayed. Set in three-dimensional space. Possibly in a psychological three-dimensional analogue of the two-dimensional space of monocular visual sensations. But possibly actually in three-dimensional physical space. In any case a sort of three-dimensional photograph of the limb-thing. A faint occurrent sensation corresponding to each differentiable point on the limb-thing’s skin surface. That continuous unified sensuous image being an objective and occurrent and distinct entity. An ‘it’. That is distinct from the limb-thing. The ‘it’ that is put nakedly on display in the

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phenomenon of ‘phantom’ limb. That is the linchpin of the explanation of postural illusions (which we explain through postulating a dislocation of the normal 1/1 spatial match of ‘it’ and the limb-thing’s skin surface). The ‘it’ into which are slotted, almost like furry great stars, our present bodily sensations. That is extinguished when total numbness reigns in a limb. Leaving blackness or nothing in that region of the mind. A possible object of the attention. Of the quasi-visual body-oriented attention. Coming from outside-to-inside. So that noticing ‘it’ is noticing the distinct limb-thing. As happens in visual perception of the limb-thing. The ‘it’ being the sensuous intermediary between limb-thing and awareness-of-limb-thing, exactly as is the visual field of visual sensations the visual-sensuous intermediary in sight. ‘Phantom’ limb being an analogue of after-image. The spatial properties of the limb being mapped in one-one projective fashion onto this three-dimensional sense-image. Thereby putting their owner in a relation of awareness to the spatial relations obtaining in the limb-thing. As happens two-dimensionally perspectivally in monocular visual fields. Then this ‘it’ is the immediate object of the attention. And of the will. For it is ‘it’ one immediately moves in physical action. ‘Feed-back’ cues concerning what one’s mind is thereby effecting mediately in the limb-thing, being provided by the existence of the 1/1 mapping relation. Rather as one might direct a guided projectile by adjusting one’s directives to it in the light of information received on a radar screen. Except that the image is here both three-dimensional and body-relative. The attention’s being directed onto the limb-thing through ‘it’, being a necessary condition of physical action. The act of moving the psychic ‘limb’ somehow causing movement in the limb-thing. The whole relation being modelled on visual perception of a body that might as well be the body of another. Via a sort of ‘touch sight’. A distancing epistemologically of oneself and one’s body. Inevitably alienating one from one’s body as from a separate object. Encompassing a theory of sensation-space. Here we have the thought-monster, a kind of Medusa’s Head, that obfuscates our thinking on body epistemology. We might call this the myth of Hypostatised Interiority. 2. com paring ‘body sense’ and sense perception (a) Sense-perception and its modes (1) Does there really exist such a sensuous entity – distinct both from awareness of the limb-thing and the limb-thing itself – causally sandwiched

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between the two? An ‘it’ such that awareness of ‘it’ is awareness of the limb-thing? If so, the relation would be sense-perceptual in character, indeed it would be closely akin to the sense of sight. Then this raises the more general question: may we legitimately interpret ‘body sense’ as a mode of sense-perception? It depends what we understand by ‘sense perception’. Now perception (‘intuition’) is the event in which the attention takes a distinct existent phenomenal item as its direct object, an object which is experienced as set in physical space. It is the concrete awareness-of a spatially given phenomenal existent. This definition is by no means stipulative in character: it is the designating of a single psychological reality. Nonetheless this single phenomenon takes three relatively dissimilar varieties of object. For on this understanding of ‘perception’, we perceive the objects of the (so-called) ‘five senses’; our own limbs and body in ‘body sense’; and (perhaps surprisingly) sensations – uniquely amongst all psychological phenomena. And significant differences exist between these examples of perception. Then how should we classify those perceptions? In particular, which of them count as ‘sense-perceptions’? This question is certainly stipulative. One familiar stipulation, which follows the above natural grouping, is such that the ‘five senses’ are understood to be paradigm examples of the kind – the grounds being the very considerable extent of their common properties. This stipulation seems to me the most cogent, and is the one I follow here. Then given the analysis of sense-perception for which I argued in chapter 6, I shall understand ‘sense perception’ to be the noticing of what comes to awareness through the noticing of a representational agency, where that noticing is effected with the causal assistance of sensation. A significant divide may be drawn amongst the ‘five senses’. In the case of the four ‘sensuous senses’ which are defined through their secondary quality (sight, hearing, smell, taste), the representational agency is the ‘perceptual sensation’ corresponding to the secondary quality of the sense. But in the case of the (tactile) ‘odd man out’ amongst the five senses, no secondary quality and a fortiori no corresponding sensation exists to play such a role, and here the prime representational agency is the spatial character of the movement of the exploring limb. (2) I return to the above extremist myth (– in which ‘body sense’ is taken to be structurally akin to sight). Given the above understanding of ‘sense perception’, does ‘body sense’ count as a further example of sense-perception? Well, one might readily think so. After all, we have here an intuitional sensuous awareness that ceases when sensation ceases. And in addition that

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standard mark of the sense perceptual relation: the illusion. And just as sight presents to awareness a select range of phenomena: object’s presence, colour, spatial properties; so here likewise a restricted range of phenomenal items are given to consciousness, viz. presence, body-relative spatial properties, internal spatial relations. And just as awareness of visual sensation is required if awareness of visually presented objects is to obtain, so an awareness of limb-feeling is needed if one is to be aware of a limb. Is this enough for sense perception? To answer this question, we must take a closer look at sense perception. (b) The general characteristics of sense perception compared with those of ‘body sense’ (1): sense mediation (1) The stipulated sense of‘sense perception’ adopted in the previous section, was such that, for an object to be sense perceivable is for the object suitably to be causing either the sense mediator of that sense or else the perceivability of the bodily mediator. For example, it might be to be causing either a red sensation at some point in the visual field, or else the perceivability of a limb movement in the course of tactile perception. Meanwhile the perception of the object consists in noticing that sensation/movement.2 Now sense perception has certain other distinctive characteristics, amongst which occurs the following important property. Whenever we sense-perceive we inevitably selectively notice certain elements of the perceptible data and fail to notice others; so that when I visually notice many faces I may notice no face, and when I see the Mona Lisa I may remark her eyes but not the colour of her hair. In sum: in sense perception an awareness of a physical existent occurs when a representor agency comes to one’s attention; and this noticing is inevitably selective from out of the rich perceptual givens of the instant. Fig. 13 analyses a case of visual perception (of a balloon upon which are three coloured marks: ‘Cs’ standing for the domain inhabited by those psychological items that are given in consciousness). Note that in sense perception certain regularities obtain. Thus, the green of the mark correlates with the green of the light it reflects, with the green of the light on the retina, with the green of the visual sensation it causes, and with the green value of the colour ascribed in the visual impression. More: the spatial relations between o and x on the balloon reappear, now in the light rays, now in the retinal image, now amidst the sensations in the visual field, 2

In touch the mind has in addition to journey beyond the representational agency to the object. But I shall ignore this complication, since sight is the model.

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Red Green Blue Retina

Red Green

Blue Green

Blue

Red

Light

Balloon

Visual field (of sensations) Blue Green

Internal object of awareness:

Red

Fig. 13

and finally in the content of the visual impression. Meanwhile, with more rudimentary senses like smell or hearing we perceive items (e.g. coffee-smell and miaow) that correlate with items of a certain type (viz. coffee and cat). Such regularities as the above are essential to the sense-perceptual relation. For in that phenomenon an item comes regularly to awareness in and through the coming to awareness either of spatially structured sensations, or of movements that correlate spatial layout with that of the object, or else of sensations of a distinctive type. This explains their possessing another equally essential trait, viz. their utility. That is, that a sense organ should be a guide to the world’s contents, and that its sensuously effected offerings should correlate regularly with those contents, are, evidently, related facts. Indeed, were sensations/movements to correlate neither qualitatively nor spatially with their cause, they would simply not be that through which the attention could pass onto their source, any more than could a murky and uneven mirror be that through which one might glimpse images of the world. That is, sense perception would not exist. (2) If this is sense perception, is our normal sensuous intuition of our body and limbs of this type? It is not. To show this I shall describe the two main relations in which we might stand to physical items through the attention. (i) Mediate sensuous intuition: sense perception. Here the attention might go onto an object in either of two ways. Either in and by landing upon sensation that is

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distinct from that object, whereupon the object appears in consciousness as endowed with properties it shares with the sensation, e.g. colour, contour. Alternatively, it goes onto an object through passing onto a spatialised mediating phenomenon in which sensation is playing a causal role, which is the situation realised in tactile perception. Common to all five varieties of sense perception are two properties: attentive mediation, and a causal role allotted to the distinctive sensation of the sense. (ii) Immediate sensuous intuition. Here the attention lands on its object without doing so in and by landing on something distinct, and such an attentive event is made possible by the presence of sensation. Then it is clear that we stand in this relation to our body. For the attention passes in just this immediate fashion onto limbs, as when one notices that a leg is flexed. This immediate awareness, which is possible only because of feeling in the limb, we non-sense-perceptually characterise as ‘being able to feel that it is flexed’. In short, we stand to our limbs in relation (ii), that of immediate sensuous intuition. This perceptual relation resembles sense perception in being a sensation-dependent relation of awareness, and resembles it also in readily permitting illusions and instantiating selectivity of content. But it is unlike sense perception in that the object of the attention here is, neither the efficacious sensations nor a sensation-assisted mediator phenomenon, but the physical object itself, viz. the limb. Unlike sense perception, this perception is non-representational in character. It is attentively immediate. (3) Now in describing the intuition of the limb as ‘sensuous’, we acknowledge that sensation in the limb has a role to play in that intuition. But precisely what role? The following may confuse us. When we notice a bodily sensation we are aware of it as at some body point, and are thus aware of that body point. And so we may come to believe that the ‘body sense’ awareness of whole limbs can take place only if each point on that limb supports some minuscule sensation, analogous to the minima visibilia of Berkeley (et al.): the whole limb being given to awareness in this piecemeal quasi-visual sense-perceptual fashion. But this is a mistake. The truth is, that certain sensations, say in muscles and joints, play a causal role in determining an immediate awareness of the limb that is not an awareness of those sensations. The so-called ‘postural’ and ‘kinaesthetic’ sensations are the causes and not the objects of an immediate though fallible awareness of the limb. Fig. 14 is a diagrammatic representation of three basic situations: awareness of bodily sensations, of visually presented physical items, of parts of one’s body. The subject noticing respectively: a bodily sensation (e.g. tickle),

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Sensation

Awareness

Point on body

Cs Red visual

Awareness

Sun

sensation

Cs

Awareness

Postural sensations (etc.)

Limb

(Causality travelling right to left, awareness travelling left to right.)

Fig. 14

an object appearing in his visual field by casting an image therein (e.g. setting sun), a limb and its posture or its movement (thanks to the causal efficacy of sensations in joints and muscles) (e.g. moving flexed leg). In the case both of sensation and limb the object is attentively immediate, while in sense perception it is mediate. Then since gross error is readily intelligible with ‘body sense’, whereas with bodily sensation it generally requires extreme states like hysteria, we may sum up the relation of consciousness to the limb in the following formula: the limb comes with non-psychologistic immediacy to awareness, not through the attentional mediation of perceptual sensation, but through the causal mediation of non-perceptual sensation. In the case of bodily sensation one’s attention goes immediately onto the sensation, which must be given as in some body place which accordingly is

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at the same instant the object of the attention as ‘place that hurts’ (say). In visual perception the attention goes onto its physical object through going onto its immediate sensation-object, e.g. as provider of the red of the sun; so that the red of the sensation and of the sun are in veridical perception necessarily of one value. But when the attention goes onto the limb – which we may suppose at that instant to pass from total anaesthesia to full aesthesia – it passes immediately yet non-mentalistically onto a part of oneself that is thus intuitable through the efficacy of bodily located sensation which helps to present that bodily part to one’s awareness as an aesthetically ‘charged’ part of a stable body-imaged self. Then it is important once more to note that awareness of the limb is the product of but is not an awareness of the sensations that cause the aesthetically ‘charged’ limb to surface to awareness. This distinguishes it from the ‘mediate sensuous intuition’ of visual (and the other three ‘sensuous’ modes of ) sense perception. (c) The general characteristics of sense perception compared with those of ‘body sense’ (2): regular correlates (1) The comparison with sense perception must fail. And this is doubly evident when one remembers the two kinds of elements that find themselves regularly correlated in sense perception. Namely: either spatial properties and presence (whether through correlating over time the space of bodily action and the spatial object, or sensation-given space and spatial object at an instant) or presence alone (through the correlation of sensation type and quality). For we perceive phenomenal items either through active physical manipulation (e.g. running one’s feeling hand around a sphere) or through sight (e.g. the two-dimensionally given (physical) space of the visual sensations systematically projectively matching that of (say) the stars in the Great Bear) or spacelessly-qualitatively (e.g. having the highly distinctive smell sensation that goes with coffee). The spatial and the qualitative regularities holding between the active movements or the ordered sensations and their objects, constitute the corner-stone around which the edifice of sense perception arises. (2) By contrast, one can discover no such correlations between the content of the intuition of the limb (viz. its presence, posture, movement) and the sensations that causally determine that intuition. Thus, consider the non-spatial datum: limb presence. Could it be that a distinctive sensation corresponds to the presence of the limb? But a simple objection disposes of this suggestion. Namely: it is beyond doubt that the

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right/left distinction, say between right and left arm, is no wise matched by corresponding quales. Now the data of ‘body sense’ are also spatial and immediately so, and all given at an instant. Then could there be a regular projective match between the space of the causative sensations and the spatial relations between the limbs which they bring to awareness? Might the situation be a structural analogue of sight? As Cs

Awareness

Blue

Red

Green Red

Green Blue

Visual field (of sensations)

Retina

Red Green

Blue Green Red

Blue

Balloon

Light

Fig. 15

occurs in visual perception – internal spatial relations like angle and proportion being preserved in light rays, retinal image, sensation image, content of visual impression – could it be thus with ‘body sense’? That is, as in Fig. 16 (the line of awareness going from left to right, of causality from right to left)? Cs

Limb Awareness

Body-image

Points on limb

Ghost image in 3D space constituted of sensations

Fig. 16

Might it be that we sense-perceive the space of the body in this 1/1 correlative matching fashion? But the sensations cannot be the space-giver in body awareness. If anything it is the other way around. The following shows this. The sensation comes to awareness as at ‘a point in physical space’ – and not just as at ‘the point on the body it is in’ – only

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to the extent that at that moment the aesthetised subject seems to himself to extend into certain nooks and crannies of physical space, and the sensation is experienced as sited therein. That is, it is thanks to the internal map or image of one’s body, the elemental framework through which at each instant we individuate sensations in our awareness, that the sensation comes to awareness as at more than a body point. This here-and-now body-map depends for its existence upon the existence of a stable or long-term ‘bodyimage’. And it is as a result of the development of this primordial referenceframe that the sensation can be experienced as at a more or less pointable-at place in space. And were the here-and-now map to contract or expand, the position seemingly of the sensation would correspondingly retreat into this contracted frame or else expand into whatever new space the mutating frame may intrude – even though its actual position would paradoxically remain the same. It follows that we put the cart before the horse in supposing that sensuous intuition of body space is mediately reached through an immediate intuition of sensation space. And yet it would have to be be so if the relation was sense-perceptual. I conclude that we have an immediate, nonmentalistic, non-sense-perceptual, yet sensuous, intuition of body space. (3) Thus, the sensation comes to awareness as already positioned in a spatially determinate body. Then how is that containing framework given in perception, how is the body as a whole experienced, not (say) in atypical cases like introspective proprioception, but such as occurs for most of our waking lives? I ask, because there is a temptation to endorse a theory of this phenomenon that seems to lend support to the visual sense-perceptual model of body-awareness, a theory which must I think be rejected. The theory in question is compelling for the following reasons. Bearing in mind the extraordinary recessiveness of proprioceptive perception, and above all the fact that whenever we need intentionally to move a limb or site a sensation we do so at once and without further ado, it can easily seem that at any particular moment we must be aware of the presence and position of every sensuously differentiable point on the body-outside. If I feel a tickle on my chin, I scratch it; if I see a missile near my head, I duck automatically; and so on. These facts may make it seem as if in some nearly subliminal way the entire body-outside is continually perceived in all its detail, even though consciousness seems not to record the multifarious detail such perception would involve, and despite the fact that this theory implies the absence here of the important phenomenon of attentive selectivity. This latter must be an embarrassment for such a theory, since perception of its very nature is a phenomenon in which the attention culls what it needs, and discards

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what it does not, from out of a richer given. And yet the theory remains compelling. However, on closer inspection this theory proves to be both unparsimonious and ill sorted with certain facts. Those facts are that when one attends self-consciously to a limb, or uses that limb in intentional action, the rest of the body inevitably recedes in awareness. Thus, the limb stands out perceptually on a ‘ground’ of the body as a whole, which is certainly also perceived, but less differentially and vividly than the limb in question. Then unless we are to embrace the improbable idea that two qualitatively different varieties of perception of the body are going on simultaneously all the time, one vastly complex and nearly subliminal, the other selective and accessible to memory centres, there seems no alternative but to abandon the doctrine of comprehensive detailed proprioception. A more economical theory is that we all the time perceive the body as a whole, recessively and with a limited measure of differentiation, and that particular sensations and/or intentional bodily actions usher into being a perceptual awareness of the body-point or part sensuously or actively singled out, an awareness that takes place on the ‘ground’ of the body as a whole. Since every differentiable point or part on the body-outside is capable of playing such a role, and since we are continually aware of the body as a whole, it is easy to misconstrue the former property as identical with the property of being actually, albeit nearly subliminally perceived. This conclusion is important: it amounts to a rejection of the visual sense-perceptual model for proprioception of the body. There is no pointby-point matching of sensation-point and body-point. The body comes to consciousness, not through the synthesis of many perceived body-points, nor even by the synthesis of many presently perceptible body-points. It comes in a wholly different and unique manner. (4) The normal animal awareness of body and body-part is intuitional, immediate, non-mentalistic, non-sense-perceptual, and sensuous. Then in supposing it given through the mediation of an immediately given threedimensional array of spaced sensations, ‘psychic stars’ in a ‘psychic sky’, we import two inapplicable models in an attempt to understand this most primordial relation. Namely: that of sight; and the relation holding between the self and the other’s body. Both models alienating the self from its body. For in importing the separation of sense-perceiver from perceived and self from other, we introduce wedges that decisively split the animal off from its body. Whereas thought may perhaps be said in a good sense to be the internalisation of dialogue, ‘the soul conversing with itself ’, it is only in a

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bad sense that we here model the relation of self to its body on that holding between self and the body of another. Thus, it is characteristic of animal consciousness that at any particular instant the animal should have an enhanced awareness of a select sector of its body, viz. the place of occurrent sensations and of the body-part the animal actively uses. Then while bodily action sometimes depends upon the sense of sight, as when one shaves by looking in a mirror, the characteristic attentive relation is immediate non-sense-perceptual. This attentive contact puts the subject in cognitive contact with its body, conveying information concerning the present state of the body. The precise nature of that information is my concern in the immediately succeeding Section (d). We shall see that it differs radically from anything which might be conveyed by a sense akin to sight. It confirms the uniqueness of this epistemological phenomenon. (d) The data of ‘body sense’ (compared with the data of sense perception) (1) What are the data of ‘body sense’? The information we acquire is of limb presence, temperature, posture, movement. Disregarding temperature, which is of little importance, it is of presence and spatiality. Disregarding presence, seeing that it is a constant, it is of spatiality alone. But what spatiality? How does the spatial information compare with that given to one in the visual field? Or with what the mythical ‘sense photo’ putatively offers to the subject? It seems that it is of an entirely different order. For there is much that is spatial, and given to sight, that is not given ‘feelingly’. Say, the contours of a body part. Clearly, this is not given. What awareness would one have of the contours of one’s face if one had no mirrors to see it in, no hands to feel it with, and no other faces to study? Does one’s body come all the time ‘feelingly’ to one as ‘oneself-shaped’? Surely not. Surely the leg shape does not seem precisely etched in our consciousness by present ‘feel’. Or imprecisely for that matter. There is no immediate ‘feel’ awareness of the contours of face or leg. Does one now ‘feel’ the back of ? Or ? Or -or? ‘Feel’ is completely one’s neck to be shaped silent on these issues. Indeed, ‘feelingly’ a limb comes to awareness neither as shaped, nor as shapeless, nor even as of indeterminate shape: it simply fails to come under such an aspect. What would it be like for one’s hand to ‘feel’ twice-sized? Would it be through the sensations that are supposedly on each point on the surface coming to consciousness as twice as far apart? But they are a myth. Again, while the visual field presents perceptible spatial relations like being-in-a-straight-line, or spatial properties like round, no

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such relations or properties are given in or between limbs or limb-parts or sensations in or on limbs or skin. A cold coin laid on the back of one’s hand neither comes as circular or non-circular. At best it comes as on some relatively smallish area of the hand. In sum: there is much that is spatial – and given to sight – that we do not get by ‘feel’. (2) We have here examples of spatial information of the kind conveyed by sight that we do not acquire by ‘body sense’. And yet we know that the subject is aware of spatial relations and phenomena in his limbs. So what that is spatial does he get in being thus aware? While the objects of awareness that are given to one in a noticing event could be described by the subject when they are cast in conceptualised form, and are in that sense propositional data, there is a good sense in which what one learns is all but completely practical. Thus, one knows immediately that one’s arm is crooked and one’s hand by one’s side; and one can state these truths. But exactly how crooked? And just where by one’s side? Well, what is the test by which we determine that the subject’s claim to know how his limbs are disposed is correct? What do we ask of him? A drawing? (Which is a thing made for eyes.) A model? (Which is the same, albeit for those of a circumambulator.) A description? But while words will go part of the way, they are less differential than the knowledge he possesses, and in the second place and precisely for the above reason almost certainly not the original form in which that knowledge exists. I think it evident that none of these tests is adequate. The tests are practical, and they take two forms. On the one hand, selfconcernful acts like reaching for the place the mosquito just bit. On the other hand and more importantly, acts in which one either manipulates objects or else manoeuvres oneself amidst the objects encountered in the environment. Think of the kind of practical knowledge that is possessed by a London bus driver, e.g. the knowledge that – ‘no, not that amount’ (concretely demonstrated) – ‘but just this amount’ (also concretely demonstrated) – of movement of the steering wheel will get us through ‘that aperture’ (ostensively indicated). A knowledge that he is unable to ‘cash’ in words. Then it is such real though inarticulable knowledge of limb posture and movement that we all of us have at any moment. These are the data of ‘body sense’. (3) This has interesting implications. For practical knowledge of this kind, mutating from instant to instant, depends upon another item of practical knowledge, which is stable from year to year. Thus, if the bus driver is to

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know that ‘this amount’ is called for, then he must in the same practical though now in a decidedly long-term sense know the width of the bus to a nicety. Then in an analogous practical sense we all of us have knowledge of our limbs’ spatial possibilities; so that a man will introduce his hand into a box but will not attempt to insert it into a small glass! Indeed, through assembling the lowest common denominator of all the acts he undertakes with his hand, we might eventually manage to assemble a sort of ‘practical photograph’ of the hand. Thus: : a something with uncertain boundaries and without specific posture; and yet real. Now to my way of thinking it is an item of this kind – no ‘it’ or sensuous entity – that is laid open to view in the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’, which is the seeming presence of a limb that is so given to one, and doubtless as determinately postured. Such an x, which tends to be misunderstood in the mode of hypostatisation, is a construct out of practical knowledge that is manifest in countless deeds and abstensions; and it is pre-verbally given. Let us leave this question with the following thought. If the constantly mutating feelingly acquired knowledge of limb space is selective and practical, how could the seeming of one’s ‘postural sensations’ to be situated at various points in physical space, be the immediate perceptual ground of one’s awareness of limb space? What translation system links the practical and the sensory? After all, only one’s deeds reveal the image: ; and one’s mutating practical knowledge depends upon the existence of that image. This is another decisive reason for distinguishing the relation in which we stand to our limbs from that of sense perception, and in particular from the model provided by sight. (e) Hypostatisation and the immediate object of the will But the central problem of this entire discussion remains unanswered. Namely: what is the immediate object of physical willing? This comes down to: what is the immediate object of awareness when a man notices a limb (say, that has until this instant of full aesthesia been totally anaesthetised)? Does there exist some entity, an entity which is sensuous in character, causally intervening between limb and awareness, that is such that awareness of it is awareness of the limb? Does the switch to full aesthesia bring into being such an entity? The answer is: No. There is no such entity. The immediate object of ‘body sense’ awareness, and hence of physical willing, is the limb itself. Then what of the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’? For it is natural to suppose that we encounter here a psychological entity that must ordinarily

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intervene between limb and awareness of limb. But what is a ‘phantom limb’? Well, there exists a phenomenon in which a person is seemingly aware of a limb, which we bring under the further description ‘aware of a phantom limb’ for the reason that the limb is absent. Thus, the ‘phantom limb’ must be the internal object of a psychological phenomenon of type, seeming-to-have-a-limb. Then it is an error to identify either this awarenessphenomenon or its internal object with a supposed ‘sense photo’ – which could in any case at best be no more than the material object of that awareness. And this finds confirmation in the fact that, whereas such a ‘sense photo’ should be capable of degrees of intensity, there is no such thing either as an intense phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’ or an intense ‘phantom limb’. Just as it cannot intensely seem to one that there is a ghost in the room, so there is no such thing as its intensely seeming to one that one’s missing leg is present; and just as there can be no such thing as the seeming presence of an intense ghost, so there is no seeming presence of an intense leg. This demonstrates that neither the experiencing of a ‘phantom limb’, nor the ‘phantom limb’ itself, can be identified with a ‘sense photo’. The ‘body sense’-impression – or seeming-awareness – has a nonseparable internal object which is given merely by the object-expression in the essential description of that awareness. But whereas in veridical sense perception there really does exist a distinct material object mediating the event of awareness and its public physical object, there is in the case of limb awareness only the internal object of awareness and the limb (which is at once material object and ‘public’ physical object). Nothing intervenes attentively between aware subject and limb. For the ‘phantom limb’ itself is no more than the internal object of a directed psychological phenomenon which fails to find an answering object. That is, the seemingly-aware-of-a-limb phenomenon that is exposed to view in the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon, which is a mental entity, does not entail the existence of a distinct or nondistinct limb-like psychological entity, viz. a seeming limb; and to suppose so would be to endorse a kind of ‘bad sense-data-ism’ in relation to the limb. Thus, the man who suffers the ‘phantom limb’ experience notices nothing as such, and this is becauses there exists no something that is such that the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon is awareness of that something. To be seemingly aware of an arm is not to be aware of a seeming arm. ‘The seeming arm’ stands for no existent. In sum: there is no arm-like entity, whether it be the supposed seemingarm entity supposedly laid bare in ‘phantom limbs’, or some supposed but

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mythical ‘sense photo’ of the limb, intervening between limb and awareness of limb. And yet one may come to believe that there is such a thing because of the confusing nature of the concept, ‘the seeming presence of a limb’. Because to speak of a ‘seeming flower’, say in the case of wax flowers, is to talk of a real something that seems as flowers seem, so we tend to think that talking of a body-image or ‘seeming body’ is to talk of a real entity that seems as the body seems. And we carry the confusion a stage further. For since awareness of a limb is sensuous, and the information spatial, we tend to import a mythical ‘sense photo’ and then to identify it and the hypostatised internal object of the seeming awareness of limbs! This multiplies confusion by two! 3. the most ex treme interiorist t heory of bod ily willing The ‘seeming arm’ stands for no existent. If it did, that seeming-arm entity would be the immediate object of physical williing. One would first and before all else move it! The will would engage immediately with it, and only mediately with the arm-thing. Indeed, if one were a ‘Cartesian’, one would suppose that a psychic willing event in the spirit mind caused, via the good graces of The Cartesian God, a psychic event in the ‘spirit body’, which in turn caused, again by the grace of The Deity, the willed event in the body-thing! Volitionism would find itself augmented by a radical brother theory. A theory with the following features. Not only is there supposed to be a distinctive psychic event in the inner world, viz. a mental volitional willing; there is in addition a distinctive psychic object of that bodily oriented will, viz. a ‘ghost limb’; and there is said also to be a psychic effect within the inner world of one’s volit-ing upon that ‘ghost limb’, viz. it moves in sensation space; and finally there is the trans-categorial producing, effected by that psychic effect, of physical change in the limb-thing, viz. it moves in space. Here we bring into the open the fullest and most extreme interiorist account of bodily action. This extreme picture is built up out of four mythical elements: internal volition; ghost-limb entity-object of volition; movement of ghost-limb in pure sensation space; trans-categorial causation by the latter psychic phenomenon of movement of the limb-thing in physical space. This theory postulates the existence of three distinct causally linked events, two mental and one bodily non-mental, when as we shall see there is in fact but one. The whole thing constitutes a radical fragmentation of animal action into mythical parts.

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Part II: The immediate object of the will 4. the concept of bo dy-image (a) Introducing the concept of body-image

(1) I have been inclined to postulate the existence of a three-dimensional ‘feel’-analogue of the visual field: a sensuous something that links the mind epistemologically to its body: an entity that it is natural to describe as a ‘body-image’. This misguided inclination is fostered by the existence of bodily illusions. Thus, the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’ may seem to expose to view a three-dimensional ‘sense photo’ that one naturally supposes present in the normal veridical situation. We say: ‘The limb seems there’, and proffer the ‘sense photo’ as the psychological material object of that experience – an account which actually fits visual experience. So we may come to believe that there is a distinct sensuous three-dimensional entity causally and attentively sandwiched between limb-thing and awareness-oflimb-thing: the entity through which the attention passes on its way to the limb-thing; and we take this to be the immediate object of physical action: the first entity with which the will engages as it reaches out for its limb-thing object. Indeed, a powerful myth seemed to lurk in the back of our minds, which it is the business of the philosopher to haul into the light of day, as if it were a kind of Medusa’s Head which we could not bear to confront that, precisely for that reason, exerts a distorting influence on our thinking on this topic. The reader will recall the full characterisation in section i of this mythic three-dimensional sensuous entity, and the arguments directed against its existence. Then let me here give a brief r´esum´e of those arguments. They were: (i) that the sensations are cause but not object of the awareness of limbs; (ii) that the above mythic entity is in all probability an hypostatisation of the internal object of a seeming-type experience; (iii) that the information given is cast in practical-ostensible rather than aesthetic-ostensible or verbalisable-propositional form. Most important: (iv) we saw from the discussion in chapter 5 that the immediate epistemological ‘given’ is not sensations in three-dimensional space, but sensations in three-dimensional space at points on limbs that are themselves given immediately as at points in three-dimensional space: neither preceding the other; so that the immediate sensuous ‘given’ is, sensation-at-a-part-of-bodyat-a-point-in-body-relative-space; while the immediate ‘given’ also includes the non-sensuous, presence-of-body-part-at-a-point-in-body-relative-space. And in addition to the above considerations the argument (v) that the limb is not given in and through the givenness of sensations at each or some

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of its surface points, even though a measure of aesthesia in some of its parts is a necessary condition of normal immediate body awareness; so that (vi) no projective regular spatial match exists that could justify modelling the relation upon sight: that is, upon a mode of sense perception which in an instant conveys rich and organised spatial data that is at least comparable with what we receive in ‘body sense’. (2) So we shall have to do without this mythical entity. Such a ‘body-image’ is a myth. Yet this conclusion is apt to leave us feeling dissatisfied. For we feel that the whole idea of a ‘body-image’ cannot just be an error. We have an intellectual need that may well in the end prove satiable, to append the term ‘body-image’ to something that is worthy of the title. Then can we offer an acceptable substitute for the ‘sense photograph’? Is there something else that is worthy of the title ‘body image’? I think there is. After all, it is customary for one’s body both seemingly to be present, and to be experienced as a spatially determinate object. Think of the quite particular information that we would acquire if at some instant we were to become immediately aware of a limb that had until that moment seemed absent. We would acquire a there-and-then knowledge of specific spatial lay-out that is best expressed in acts of pointing and manipulation (etc.). Then we might on the basis of (practical) data of this kind assemble across time a general picture of the entire body, exactly as we earlier modelled an of the hand, which finds particular values at particular instants. image This picture or ‘practical photograph’ (as we called it), which is assembled out of practical-ostensible ‘seemings’, is a representation of the image of the body. It is a representation of what I shall call ‘the body-image’. Herewith we launch this expression into use in this work. This image is put to use in body-awareness. Here it acquires a specific postural value, an internal object which one might call ‘the image of the moment’. But there are several important provisos in doing so. First, the image of the moment is not an experienced existent entity. Second, a fortiori it is not an existent entity that is the psychological material object of the attention, let us say when one’s completely anaesthetised body suddenly becomes fully aesthetised. Third, it is a schema that leads to the internal, rather than to a psychological material, object of an awareness-type experience. Fourth, the picture must be interpreted according to a practical convention. Fifth, the body is the immediate object of a veridical such awareness. Sixth, and such an awareness of the body is distinct from the awareness of postural and kinaesthetic sensations upon which it causally depends. Given these all-important provisos, we can now put to use the

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concept of a body-image – freed of the mythological accoutrements. It may be said to be the animal analogue of the mental luggage carried more or less permanently by the London bus-driver. (b) The immediate object of bodily willing – expressed in these terms What need have we of the concept of body-image? Let us recall what is the normal epistemological standpoint towards one’s own body. It is, fromoutside-onto-side-and-surface (which reflects the fact that we grasp and touch the sides of our own and other bodies and objects with the sides and surface of our own body). Then this directional relation, in presenting the outside of our body to ourselves, simultaneously conceals the inside. In this sense the interior organs are as remote from our idea of ourselves as are extra-bodily objects. Thus, hands and legs enter our awareness of ourselves as kidneys and spleen do not. This shows that we have a selective awareness of ourselves. A selective bodily awareness. The primordial idea of oneself – what we refer to when we speak of ‘I’ – includes hands and eyes and nose, and does not include such parts as kidneys and spleen. It is a something that is assembled out of hands and mouth and . . . And it is a something that is such that the body-image is a particular internalisation of all-of and of nothing-but its parts. Translated into these concepts we may say, that one reason why the idea of willing movement in extra-bodily objects or internal organs is unintelligible is, not merely that we lack ‘feel’ in those items, and not merely that as a result we lack proprioceptive contact with them. It is in addition that they do not find representation in the body-image. Not only is (almost) all physical action the willing of change in oneself, nor only of change in a part of which one is aware, it is the willing of change in a part of oneself that enters the body-image. A necessary condition of willing change in a physical object is that it be incorporated in the body-image. This is a further necessary condition of that centrally important genus of action that we bring under the descriptions, ‘physical action’, ‘bodily action’, ‘bodily willing’. This requirement transcends the narrower requirement, which is not strictly necessary, that the object be a bodily part. After all, a prosthetic finger is no more a finger than is a wig a head of hair. Nonetheless, it may enter the body-image as spleen does not. We can now say with more exactitude what is involved in the ‘immediate presence’ of a bodily part over which we have willing control. It is first that the limb is a bodily part which enters the veridical body-image

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of that moment. And it is secondly that the limb is a proprioceptively perceived part of a proprioceptively perceived totality. This is what constitutes the ‘immediate presence’ that is necessary for physical action. Accordingly, a man with a prosthetic finger may incorporate its image into his bodyimage, whereupon a preliminary necessary condition has been realised of its immediate presence. While if a relation of immediate presence is actually established with that prosthetic finger, presumably as a result of bodily sensation, a further fundamentally important necessary condition has thereby been realised both of his feeling sensation in and of willing phenomena in it. I shall at this point indicate in more detail precisely why we have need of the concept of body-image. This I do in several stages: first in the ensuing section (c), and then in the succeeding sections (d) and (e). (c) The need for the concept (1): developing a ‘map’ for life’s purposes (1) Consider early infant development. The baby sucks at the breast and also kicks his legs. Now are these two phenomena on a par from the point of view of type, of control, of epistemology? Well, while both phenomena are actions, it is not immediately apparent whether or not the mentation behind kicking could be intentionally directed towards anything more specific than (say) sheer movings. It is an open question whether the newly born are capable of purposive action with their legs. Purposive action happens, whether by birth or later, only when desires can aim future-wards: that is, when we can apply concepts like ‘reaching for’ and ‘chasing after’ and ‘looking around at’. Then I suggest that as a matter of contingent fact it might well be the case that this applies first concerning acts like biting and sucking and reaching for the breast, and only secondly concerning (say) kickings. Expressed in Freudian terminology, we could then say that the infant’s body-ego is at first an oral ego: orality would be the scene of his first self-determinings: the self would find a focal point in and around the mouth. If this was how things stood, it might be accompanied by a lack of differentiation-in and integration-of the image of certain other bodily parts into the body-image of the moment. That is, the body-image of the infant may not as yet include fully differentiated and integrated representations of certain bodily parts which will at a later stage enter the image: for example, representations of each leg. Until that potential is realised, it may also be that the active powers over the legs as such would be incapable of taking purposive form, of spreading the empire of self-determining intention farther

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in the body: the act-desires finding expression taking no more than the rudimentary form of ‘feeling like doing’. If this was how things happened to be, then the leg movings of early infancy would be merely purposeless collective activities. Now all of this is sheer conjecture. But I mention it in order to emphasise two properties of the body-image: its mutability and its unity. The above seems to be a possible state of affairs, and would realise one form of mutabilty and one variety of synthesis. I will now set against these examples several different possibilities. (2) To begin, consider the following perfectly imaginable situation, which has the advantage of indicating both the need for a primordial bodily image of the body for the self, and exhibiting a different variety of mutation from the above. This is the situation in which a person has a novel graft of flesh attached to his body, with which he lives for years. It seems natural to assume that contact with that graft at some point p would at first seem to be at the point p’ at which the graft meets the rest of the body, and only much later seem to be at p. After all, would it not be surprising if a very light and long graft were immediately to make felt both its presence and extent and shape? And yet living with such an object would probably in the end effect alterations in immediate-seemings. That is, produce a novel range of experiences that fall under ‘seeming . . .’ headings. It follows that over that period a change must have occurred in this man which is such that, where previously he was incapable of having an experience of a touch seeming to be at p, he could now do so. (Whereupon the body-image must be that which is such that this is change in it.) Now this is a matter of definition; for this is how I am using ‘body-image’. For it must be emphasised that it is not because his body-image has expanded to p that he can now have such experiences. Rather, the expanding of his body-image to p and his capacity to have such experiences are one and the same alteration. After all, the body-image is something that is schematically given when we trace an image that is interpreted by a convention such that it tells us the type of ‘seeming . . .’ experiences we can have. Roughly, it is a summary statement, in the concrete, of the common character of all the immediate-seemings that this being is capable of experiencing. (3) It looks as if, both in the case of a man learning to live with a graft, and probably also in the case of infants, a kind of practical map comes to be enlarged: a map of the body for the body’s owner: a map for life’s purposes. The map represents limbs, say legs, and position of limbs with respect to the rest of the body, such as legs in relation to mouth and hands.

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Thus, like any good map it contains information concerning both the presence of items and the internal spatial relations between them. Indeed, we earlier saw that spatial relations are an essential pre-requisite of this primordial development, since a limb’s seeming-present and seeming-tobe-at-a-place are aspects of a unitary whole. This map of the body, which is of no experienceable psychological entity and a fortiori no sensuous entity, having application to animals through a practical convention, is a pre-requisite of bodily action. More differentially, remembering that a baby’s kickings may be non-purposive collective activities, it could be that a fully differentiated and integrated body-image is a necessary condition of purposive behaviour in each body-part. In sum, while the immediate object of the will is, not a ‘sense photo limb’, but an actual physical limb, that limb has to be incorporated into the body-image. To repeat: the immediate object of the will is a body-part that is both given veridically to immediate awareness and mapped in the body-image.

THE OLD WORLD

AMERICA AUSTRALIA

Fig. 17

(4) The comparison in Fig. 17 with developing maps of the world seems to me to be apposite. Possible developmental stages being: (A) A knowledge, from the Old World, of the reality of America, but without knowledge of the direction in which it lies (rather as people might have supposed El Dorado to be – ‘somewhere or other’). (B) A knowledge, still from the Old World, of one possible route to America, viz. travel west.

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(C) A knowledge, The World’s Centre expanding to encompass America, of a limitless number of ways of travelling between them, consequent upon the discovery that the world is round, e.g. by travelling north, south, east, west, . . . The analogy with the body being, that the unified and completed bodyimage may have had a developmental history, beginning with an oral focus and concluding as an integrated differentiated totality which need not reveal the contingent paths by which it arrived at the fully developed state. Thus, the empire of purposive intention, and of the higher masters it serves and represents, extends eventually all over the body, making for self-rule and the possible rule of reason at all places on the body-surface. And yet this condition might have been preceded by a state in which purposive intention had limited scope, and raw act-impulse was the source of all active events occurring outside that charmed circle, the final completed state of full differentiation and integration betraying no evidence of the fact that (say) the original scope of purposive intention and the focal point of the self was centred around head and hand and mouth. In fact there are two distinct types of body-image development, exemplified perhaps in infancy and certainly in adolescence: the first a development in which integration of the already existent but not wholly integrated occurs, for it may be that the will can range all over the infant body but the mind cannot; the second a development in which an already fully integrated entity incorporates into itself certain novel and burgeoning powers and endowments. In one case the body-image completes itself, in the other case it enlarges itself. (5) Between the years 1925 and 1930 Picasso produced a number of paintings of the human body, sometimes under the title ‘The Painter and his Model’, in which organs that are normally sited in the head are set adrift in the body. Thus, in one painting something akin to an eye gapes at one from something not unlike a shoulder, while what may well be a mouth appears in mid-torso! The ‘meaning’ of such a painting is, I suggest, along the following lines. By redistributing eyes around the body, the artist depicts something more than the contingency of the human condition, the irremediable animality of man, the extent to which we are not made in God’s image. He also puts on display the fact that, while the brain is the location of the mental and therefore the pre-eminent site of the self, it is contingency that the preeminent site of the self and the standpoint of visual perception should be identical, and that this identity is no part of our experience. For in looking through the eye, we have no experience of the fact that the place from which we are looking is pre-eminently the site of the self. (It is a delusion,

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indeed an almost Victorian delusion, to suppose we do.) Most important: the artist shows in the concrete, in relation to man and his body, an analogue of the fact that it is sheer contingency that historical consciousness moved outwards from Europe to the entire world – and that the resulting unified world-wide historical consciousness might have had a different avenue of coming to itself. That is: the body-image may well originally have been oral-centred and eventually universal – but might have been foot-centred and by early childhood is universal – whereupon the mind subsides into the body in final union and the head loses its absolute pre-eminence. Thus, this painting manages to site us both in the contingency of our flesh, and of the unique physical world that we inhabit, by such visual devices as a redistribution of organs and a diminution of the organ of consciousness, the head or brain. So this is a picture for our time: that is, for a time when, the Gods having fallen out of the skies, man himself falls as never before into the physical world that he inhabits and the physical body he possesses. Standing at the present moment at a polar extreme from Cartesianism, he is ‘there’ in body and world as never before, and so just ‘there’ as never before. Accordingly, we may say that Picasso, by employing a variety of means for emphasising that man is pre-eminently ‘there’ at all outer places on his body, uses the body to hold up the mirror to the human condition, and in particular those aspects that have engaged European thinkers over the last century. Then since, as Heidegger observed, a certain mode of anxiety is occasioned by being-in-the-world itself, we should expect such a picture to induce a salutary and revelatory form of anxiety. And so it does. (d) The need for the concept (2): in order to receive sensation ‘projects’ At this point I bring forward certain considerations which strengthen the case in favour of the thesis that the body-image is a necessary element of animal existence. They relate to the concept, the location of sensation. There are two more or less standard tests for the place of a sensation: what seems to one to be the case; and the place of the cause – which we fix by the tracing-neighbourhood test. And normally these two tests yield the same result. But sometimes the ‘seeming’ test gives a less differentiated even though veridical result than the tracing-neighbourhood test. For while sensations necessarily come to their owner as of some bodily part, say in the upper half of the body, they need not come as in the particular part they are in, for example as in tooth x. In that case the subject is correct in believing it is where it is, and merely ignorant of its precise location; and

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this is akin to seeing that the stars are higher than the trees but being unable to see that Venus is closer than Jupiter. On the other hand, sometimes the ‘seeming’ test, while yielding a veridical large-scale result, may at the same time provide an erroneous reading of the precise location of the sensation; and this would be akin to seeing that the moon is higher than the trees, while at the same time seemingly seeing that it is touching a cloud. The following is an example of the latter situation. Thus, suppose a graft G is joined to one’s shoulder, and a pin stuck into G at p1 ; then the resultant pain, which is situated at p1 , as the tracing-neighbourhood test would show, may well come to awareness as at p . Fig. 18 shows how the differentiable tactile distinctness of the points p1 and p2 and p3 , would enable us to precisely locate sensations which are seemingly located at p and p and p and are in fact at p1 and p2 and p3 (thanks to the projective factor).

G

p2

p1 p′ p′′ p′′′

p3

Fig. 18

The possibility of error of this type, in which we would either point to or name p or the shoulder rather than p1 or graft G, reveals one of the functions of the body-image. For at time t1 a sensation at p1 on G can be experienced as at p but not as at p1 and not as in G; while the identical physical cause could at some later time t2 cause at the same point p2 the identical sensation-type, and now the sensation is not only at p1 and G, it also comes to awareness as at p1 and as in G. (Indeed, were the change within the subject to happen instantaneously, the one persisting sensation would seem to leap from shoulder onto novel self-part G!, and we should in some sense actually experience both the phenomenon of projection and of enlargement of the here-and-now bodily self !) This difference in the character of one’s experience of a sensation can come about only when the graft onto the body has been assimilated into the body-image. The latter conditions the former. Thus, at t1 the subject reaches for his shoulder, looks automatically at his shoulder, thinks automatically ‘in the shoulder’, when any point on graft G is stimulated; while at t2 he reaches for the point on

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the graft, looks there automatically, and thinks ‘in graft G’. When he has enlarged his repertoire of experiences to this extent, when his mind brings p1 correctly under wider descriptions like ‘in graft G’, and when all of this is automatic – we say that G has entered the body-image. Once that has been accomplished he can become aware of G itself, and not merely aware of a myriad of sensorily stimulated places on G. For example, an event of this kind would happen if a total anaesthesia in G were to be suddenly replaced by full aesthesia. Such an experience of G can of necessity occur only in those who have integrated G into their bodyimage. And all those myriad distinct places, were they now simultaneously to be stimulated, would come as located on a single thing, viz. the limb G. For the primal internal landscape upon which they can take root has finally taken shape: the ultimate coordinate system onto which the mind projects its brain-located body-type sensations: one’s unthinking and primordial image of a sector of one’s body and self. Note that the concept of body-image goes hand in hand with that of projection. For the enlargement of the body-image to include graft G, implies that sensations which once were projected (say) onto p1 as at p , find themselves projected instead (say) onto p1 as at p1 ; and this because the body-image at the later date t2 bends veridically outwards so as to encompass the contours of G. Thus, the sensation is projected outwards from the mind, landing on a surface that is veridically internalised in the body-image, rather as does a visual sensation light upon the first opaque object lying in its direction. The body-image concept, and the projection concept, are united in that projection requires the existence of the internalised spatially given body-part that receives the project: that is, it requires a body-image. The very concept, location of a sensation, necessitates such a something. (e) The need for the concept (3): it is a necessary attribute of animality that it appear to itself as physically determinate (1) Suppose there existed a sort of octopus with a round centre C, and a very long extraordinarily flexible limb L that could fall into endlessly labyrinthine convolutions. We shall suppose that the end-part H is a kind of hand, and that some desirable object O is nearby. Now not only would so weirdly endowed a creature not know where H is situated relative to the fixed stars: it would not know where H is relative to its own centre C ! Given such arbitrary and irregular complexity, it is inconceivable that in the situation represented in Fig. 19 (i) this creature should know immediately by ‘feel’ that H is by C, or in Fig. 19 (ii) that H

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C

L O

C

(i)

H

O

(ii)

Fig. 19

is by the external object O.3 Therefore it would not know whether to move H right or left, or up or down, if it desires either to scratch or clutch C or reach for object O! Indeed, if its entire repertoire of physical acts consisted in the moving of the H part of L, its physical act-desires would be incapable of full determinateness! If we suppose the creature to have an urge to bring H to C, say to scratch a resident itch, that urge would not also be, as it usually is, an urge to raise (or lower, or whatever it be) that limb, and hence could not exist. Such an animal would be, so to say, ‘an impossible animal’. The indeterminacy of the self’s image of its body being matched by an indeterminacy in desire, and in the final analysis of the very self. For the animal self is of necessity given to itself in bodily terms. (2) If an animal’s body is to be actively employable, the animal must be such that at any point in time it incorporates a veridical body-image, an image which might nonetheless (say, in formative stages) be in some respects undifferentiated, failing to map certain outer parts of the body. Then that map must either be a single unified totality, like a continent, or else consist in a unified centre and accompanying outlying ‘islands’ which have the as yet unrealised potential of being integrated into it. In short, some kind of unified diversified veridical map must exist. What would it be like if no such map existed for the body B of some animal? To answer this question, consider once again a graft situation. Thus, suppose a bee stings the end p of a fantastically light long novel graft G whose nerves are linked to the body B at p . Then the pain would at first be seemingly felt as at or near p , even though it is actually felt at p. But once G is assimilated into the body-image – which shows a natural 3

Its brain might be so marvellous that it yet knows. But note the radical adjustments that are needed to accommodate this possibility. We shall have to throw out the feature: knowing by feel; for ex hypothesi there is a limitless array of configurations for L, and hence of ‘feels’, and no regular connection between ‘feel’ and position, posture, movement; for ex hypothesi we are concerned with a limb that is not merely complicated, but irregularly so.

7. The body-image (1): myth and reality p

G

p′

p′′ B

273 p′′′

Fig. 20

imperialist tendency to expand and absorb – and an internal coordinate system established whereby ‘seems to be at p’ and hence also ‘seems to be at p rather than p ’ can be part of the immediate data – it will be felt at p and as at p. Thus, prior to mapping G, all the points on G, which may well be tactually differentiable one from the other, are so to say telescoped into the small region near p (Fig. 20). Now what would it be if those at p were in turn to be telescoped into some p , and p to p . . . ? What would it be if absolutely all sensations were deflected thus? All spatial ‘seemings’ would, in the case of sensations, then vanish. Then how could one discover the place at which they were felt? If such an extreme situation was realisable, the notion of place of sensation would collapse into that of place of cause. Since this is unacceptable, and would in any case remove at a single stroke all possibility of bodily action and even of body awareness itself!, we must assume that there exists some internal frame of reference that can putatively support the projected sensations. That is, a body-image of some kind. It seems that it is a necessity: an almost (but not quite, as we shall later see) a priori-given feature of all forms of animal life in any life system. That is, any animal must wholly unself-consciously be given to itself to be a physically, and in particular a spatially, determinate something. 5. short- and long-term body-image (a) Short-term body-image We saw that, if an animal had a graft G attached at some point p to its body, and a stimulus was to occur at some point p on G, then it might cause a sensation at p that was seemingly at p . But if at some later date the same stimulus to the same point was to cause the same sensation, and if during the intervening period the graft had been lived with in many kinds of situations, the later sensation may well seem veridically to be at p in G. The explanation of this difference must be, that a particular efficacious change occurred in the subject. We describe that explanatory change as ‘G being incorporated into the body-image’. The sensation now projects onto an enlarged image that fits and discloses the new part to its owner.

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These facts suggest the need for two distinct senses for ‘body-image’: a here-and-now short-term sense, and a long-term sense. I shall begin this discussion by a consideration of the former. The here-and-now sense would be given by the description or drawing or model one would assemble in order to say how the body seems to one at a certain instant in time. For example: torso straight, right arm extended out from body, crooked at something like a right angle, etc. Let us call this hereand-now image, ‘i’. Then, mutating continually, i has amongst other roles one very important function which we delineated earlier in the discussion. Namely: it provides the framework in which to locate sensations such that we shall be able to state, not only in what part of the body that sensation is located, but also its body-relative position. That is, not only ‘in my left hand’, but also ‘in my left hand and near my chin’. Therefore i also determines self-concernful and other-concernful acts. Thus, without it one would be unable to employ one part of one’s body to act upon another part of one’s body; and it is likewise thanks to i that we are able actively to intervene in the surrounding environment, for it is a necessary condition of coordinating the deliverances of sight or touch with our capacities for physical action. A man with indeterminate i may perhaps be capable of wishing to reach for an orange set in his visual field, but he would be incapable of wishing to reach thuswise for an orange. Hence he would be incapable of a determinate wish to reach for an orange, and therefore incapable of reaching for an orange. And so i changes from instant to instant, and comes and goes as full aesthesia is replaced by complete anaesthesia. And a certain here-and-now occurrent sense of ‘seem’ accompanies i; for it is in this sense that we say: ‘My arm seems bent’ or ‘My leg seems to have gone’, and both of these utterances convey information concerning i at that instant. (b) Long-term body-image (1) Side by side with this changing i, there is that which only very slowly mutates and develops, and I shall call it ‘I’. This provides us with the longterm sense of ‘body-image’, and is probably the usual sense given to the expression. It finds employment when ‘seem’ is used in a way that is sharply to be contrasted with the above usage. Thus, a neurologist might say of a man whose leg has been anaesthetised, ‘His leg still seems to him to be there’ – even as we say of him in the i-sense of ‘seem’, ‘For a moment his leg does not seem to him to be there’. Now the content of I is at once long-term and inaccessible to consciousness. Thus, the I-use of ‘seem’ cannot

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be introspective in character. While i can come and go with sudden total aesthesia and anaesthesia, I may take years to be ensconced and decades to depart. Then the relation between i and I shows in various ways. For example, we would say of a man whose long-term body-image finally incorporated G: ‘I now includes G’; and thereupon find ourselves in a position to make such claims as: ‘At 12.00 a.m. i included G in posture P and moving M-wise.’ Roughly, to say of an object x that it has entered I, is to say the following: depending on aesthesia, this man is so constituted that, not only can he be immediately aware of a sensation in x, he can now be immediately aware both of x itself and of sensations in x as in x (etc.). It follows that the characterisation of I must omit features like movement and posture, and include features like the limb itself and the general spatial relations holding between the limb and the other parts of the body. And note: it is constituted entirely out of primary qualities, and presumably includes such non-spatial properties as hardness, softness, solidity. Why not? These last are of fundamental dynamic significance in our dealings with the environment. (2) I continue with the project of delinating the relation between i and I. We saw that i provides ‘a here-and-now framework in which to locate sensations such that we are able to state, not only in what part of the body the sensation is located, but also its body-relative position’. Furthermore, it is clear that I can persist without i, say in total anaesthesia. Most important of all, i’s depend upon I. A present I is a necessary condition of any i, and is the foundation upon which a sequence of i’s are erected. It is the stable body-image which enables the body to seem configurated such-and-suchwise at any instant: the self seeming to the self to be materially and spatially stable and determinate. And yet the precedence of I is not temporal. For I’s cannot come to be without i’s coming to be. It is a logical priority; and, to repeat, amounts to this. That to delineate I is to characterise the relatively unchanging body-image without which the embodied self cannot be given to itself as determinately disposed in space. This implies that I must be of fundamental importance to animal life. Without I an animal could not manage to be involved purposively in determinate physical situations. Thus, it could scarcely engage with the world. Here is a summary statement of the relation between i and I. Since I can exist at some instant t1 even as no i exists, say in a condition of total | an i exists at t1 . But the reverse entailment anaesthesia, an I exists at t1→ must hold. Namely: an i exists at t1 → an I exists at t1 . That is, a limb L cannot experientially seem to be in a certain spatial state S if it does not

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seem to be a relatively determinately shaped part of one and to be attached in a certain way to the rest of the body. And one other important element of the relation between i and I is, that at each instant at which an i exists it must be able to incorporate into itself any part of the entire content of the prevailing I of the moment. In other words, for one to seem disposed so at some moment is for such a one to seem so disposed at that time. (3) Then could it be that I is no more than an abstraction from i at any instant? If so, the concept of I can be of little interest. But we shall see that this is not a correct account of the situation. Consider a certain limb L, say an arm. It will be noted that, in respect of L, the short-term i at t1 , call it i1 , and i at t2 i2 , and i at t3 i3 , . . . , have certain significant common properties. Thus, doing a succession of drawings which conventionally indicate itx at any instant tx , we find that in the part of the drawing that corresponds to L there exists the following: a part attached at p , approximately one yard long, several inches across, roughly cylindrical in shape, hinged at the middle, etc. That is, in a specific region of body space surrounding p , call it R, as x takes all sorts of values, we find the above regularity in its contents. This is represented diagrammatically in Fig. 21. One notes the absence of features like: moving, still, raised, lowered. And the conservation of features like: cylindrical, hinged-in-the-middle, a yard long, attached at p . These last provide that basic elemental stability, the determinateness of long-term body-image I, which is a necessary condition of physically manipulating sectors of the physical world (including one’s own body).

it1 R

it3

p′ R

it2

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As the world can be given in thought only to what is endowed with consciousness, so it can be given in intuition only to what is endowed with a body. And as it can be given in thought only to what is equipped with concepts, so it can be given in intuition only to what is possessed of a long-term

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and indeed sometime veridical body-image. For in the absence both of intentional bodily action and perceptual orientation, a world could scarcely crystallise out of the mere deliverances of (say) sight augmented by nothing more than innate endowments of the kind given to man. Therefore the concrete or intuitional given-ness of the world to one, without which it could not be given in thought, seems to depend upon one’s being endowed with a long-term and sometime veridical body-image. That is, the intuitional given-ness of the world to one is dependent upon one’s sometime veridically seeming to oneself to be a determinately shaped, determinately sized, determinately hard-or-soft something. This brand of physical selfgiven-ness is a condition of the physical given-ness of reality, and therefore also of any proper consciousness. Unless the self sometimes knows itself in the physical mode, it will not in the same mode know reality. And without the latter it will have no mode of access, whether through thought or perception, to reality. In short, no body-self then no world! Here we have a little remarked determinant of consciousness and the sense of reality. Acquiescence in physical finitude, physical determinacy, and physical character. Just as man requires a psychological character, a measure of psychological determinateness, a psychological self, so with the body-self. A man can be intelligent one day and stupid the next, a decent person in the morning and a demonic force in the afternoon, but there must be that relatively unswerving x which underlies these wayward phenomena and in the light of which they emerge as intelligible. Likewise with the body-image I, the fundamental representation of what physically one is. We require a bodily nature in our own eyes: we need to be a something made up of a limited set of physical constituents, determinately related. In short: a physical structure. This entails the absence of chaos, the presence of order, the obtaining of regularity, in the self considered as physical object for the self. Such a regularity may have no history. A foal tumbled out of the womb might there and then pick itself up and walk away across the grass, even as a human infant automatically begins sucking at the breast. Nonetheless, such a regularity is a necessity if any i, and hence I, is to be attributed to some creature. And any purposeful movement necessitates as much. Accordingly, regularities will appear in the future if the animal has a future; and if it does not, would have done so. To be sure, I could mutate over the years, and even do so at an alarming rate, though this is uncharacteristic. And yet we should still at any instant be able to say:if I stays as it now is,then within the region R from now on the following traits will be present in all succeeding

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i’s. If this were not so, the concept of I would, as we earlier noted, have no differential utility. It would be a mere abstraction. And it is not. (c) The stability-in and the rationale-of I (1) If we are to act, such a regularity amongst i’s must exist, whether categorically realised or merely conditionally. This is because the agent must have something to rely upon, to fall back upon, if he is to act at all. I mean: his determinately given own material self. This is given, not in any experience, nor in any psychological phenomenon, but (so to say) across an open-ended set of experiences. Thus, the subject must be given to himelf, rather as we conceive of a palm tree that is perpetually blowing in the wind, or of an underwater plant that forever sways in the unending currents, as a something with a determinate material structure that is manifest in all the instant-by-instant i’s – with this difference, that whereas there is such a thing as the shape of a plant, it might in a rather strained sense of ‘shape’ be said that nothing is the shape of an animal – inasmuch as no posture, whether in sleep or during sentry duty, is standard. Then it is important to realise that, precisely because I is more than an abstraction from a series of situations, that determinate material structure cannot as such be disclosed, either in a single i, or even in a set of i’s. Let us consider two nearly conand might be temporaneous i’s as an example. Thus, common to : that is, three particular parts of fixed shape which relate according to a hinge principle. Yet it might instead be that the constituent parts are ; which will therefore be common to all the i’s of this being. Then each of these hypotheses have differential predictive value. For if the latter theory is correct, subsequent or merely conditionally given i’s corresponding to that or ; and may well I are not permitted to include examples like or (etc.). include Thus, I consists of fixed parts, mostly hinged onto one another, and (so to say) provides a principle of possibility. Each I is consistent with one set of i’s and inconsistent with another set, so that given that a certain I obtains from some ti to tn , the set of i’s intervening between ti and tn must fall within the first and without the second set. It is of course not that the subject calculates which I is determined by all recently elapsed i’s, deduces from that I the members of the set of all i’s consistent with I, and as a result realistically trains his sights only upon such i’s as fall within that set. Rather is it that I is such that the recently elapsed i’s, and the i’s of the various bodily configurations that he attempts to manipulate or expects,

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fall completely automatically within that single I-determined set. For he is given as I-like to himself. And so the distinction between i and I emerges in the fact that I is the determinant of actual and potential sets of i’s. Indeed, part of the rationale of I must be to constrain intentional projects within the bounds of bodily possibility. It all takes us back to the supposition that at any instant a man must be given to himself to be a material thing that may possibly spread into any one of a set of shapes and may not spread into any of another set – for the reason that he is given to himself as a material thing constituted out of certain hinged relatively inflexible parts. That is, there must for him be a description of himself that is independent of particular postures at any instant. It will be what one might call: the integration of a so-called ‘exploded diagram’. This is I. (2) Now if i1 depends on I1 at t1 , and i2 depends on I2 at t2 , must I1 = I2 ? By no means; and certainly not with logical force. Yet what would be the use of the distinction i/l if I1 and I2 and . . . showed no tendency to coincide in the one person over reasonable stretches of time? The regularity amidst i’s would cease to have the fundamental causal property of determining the i’s of the body-configurations that its owner may and may not expect, and I would have the character of an abstraction from the situation of the moment. But the reality of the i/I distinction may in any case be demonstrated in a different and most revealing way. It shows in a second fundamental causal property of I. Namely: in the fact that I causes the transition from s1 (= all the postural and kinaesthetic sensations obtaining in one at ti ) to it1 . For given s1 and I, it1 automatically results. This automatic phenomenon is analogous to the seemingly miraculous phenomenon that occurs when knowledge of the look of sky, sea, earth, together with one’s present contextual beliefs, causes an array of visual sensations to seem to present a particular landscape to view. Indeed, this is the other special and, so to say, defining causal function of the phenomenon of the long-term body-image. For these two fundamental causal properties of I provide the very rationale of the body-image. Thus, given the long-term body-image one has at some time t, which includes limbs such as legs as well as a graft G that one acquired ten years ago; and given also the sensations in joints and muscles prevailing at some instant; then it cannot but seem to one that one’s body is at that instant in such and such a posture and exhibiting such and such body-relative movements. To repeat: the fundamental role of I

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is both to expedite the causal transaction from s1 (e.g. slight sensation of strain in shoulder joint, sensation of contracted biceps, . . .) to seemingto-oneself-to-be-thus-postured-and-moving (which is to be indicated in practical ostensible mode) and also to determine the range of possible postures and movements one may attempt. That is, to the i of the moment and its movements, and of succeeding possible i’s. These I-functions may be wedded in the following claim: I is that which expedites the transition from the given sensations of any instant to the range of possible postures and movements one may realistically attempt. Then it seems to me that this formula might be embellished with one other vitally important derivative property: the creating of the framework through which sensations are individuated (without which perception as such would be an impossibility and physical reality inaccessible – so that I must be the very platform from which the attention projects itself outwards). These properties animals could not be without. We must at any instant have something to rely upon, an I, if we are to seem to ourselves to be in the presence of a body, whose parts are our parts, there and then endowed with ostensibly given spatial properties. That is, at any instant we must seem to ourselves to be a determinate physical something if we are to seem spatially to be disposed in a certain way. Now both of these ‘seemings’ are necessary conditions of bodily striving as such. While if bodily action is to occur, they must in addition be veridical. Accordingly, an I, a veridical I, and not just an i, a veridical i as well, are necessary conditions of physical action. If a man is to be able to physically act, then not only must he be able to experience such experiences as that limb L is moving, or even such novelties as that graft G is over to the left. He must in addition seem to himself to be a something that is endowed with G’s or L’s or suchlike. And he must be right on both counts. Thus, s1 → i1 only if s2 → i2 and s3 → i3 and . . . and there exists an I common to i1 and i2 and i3 and . . . This is not an entailment, but it is in fact how things are. As it is at best only theoretically possible to be in love for a mere five seconds, or a genius for a few instants, so it is not possible for the long-term body-image I to fluctuate wildly at a rapid rate. Given vast advances in brain science, such freak possibilities may emerge as realisable; but in fact they are absolutely discountable. (3) So much for the moment concerning the long-term body-image. But there remain difficulties in this concept, and obscurities in the reasons which prompt us to posit the existence of this entity. These issues must be resolved if we are to properly understand this phenomenon, and they are addressed

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in the immediately succeeding chapter. However, there is one other reason for pursuing these questions, and it is of some importance. In what follows it will emerge that the concept of the long-term body-image enables us to explain the very possibility of ‘body sense’ (proprioception). Without a concept of such a kind as that of the long-term body-image, proprioception would be an unintelligible phenomenon. The chapter which now follows aims at following these questions to their terminal point.

chapter 8

The body-image (2): the long-term body-image

The term ‘body-image’ is ambiguous. There exists on the one hand a mentalistic concept of ‘body-image’, which is exemplified in such familiar comments as ‘Anorexics have a distorted body-image’. There also exists what is surely a less overtly mentalistic concept, which we find at work in assertions like ‘Infants already possess a body-image’ and ‘Amputation has no instantaneous effect on one’s body-image.’ Now I see no prospect of unifying these two usages, for the simple reason that they are in my opinion concerned with different realities. Then when I speak of a ‘longterm body image’, it is the second less overtly mentalistic phenomenon that I have in mind. This is the phenomenon which has interested neurologists, and a grasp of its character and origin is essential to an understanding of the mind-body problem. In chapter 7 I delineated some of the main properties of this phenomenon, but as we noted at the end of that chapter certain fundamental questions remain. These questions mostly concern the concept. For it seems to me that a large part of the philosophical problem of the body-image consists in assembling an intelligible and veridical concept of the phenomenon, and in setting out what kinds of considerations would constitute an adequate justification for launching that concept into use. I begin with a discussion of the latter issue. 1 . the hypothesis of the long-t erm body-image (a) The hypothesis When I postulated the existence of a long-term body image, I was entertaining a particular complex hypothesis. Namely: that there exists a perceptual sense of ‘how at instant t one seems to oneself to be disposed in spatial respects R in space’,1 which is such that what it singles out is to be causally 1

I mean: a proprioceptive ‘seeming’ whose content is R.

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explained by the joint operation of two causal factors. The first of these factors is something present and phenomenal that is causally sensitive to, and probably causally explained by, the spatial properties singled out in the perceptual experience: for example, the factor in question might be postural or kinaesthetic sensations, but could in addition be neurological phenomena. The second causal factor is something that is singled out by a different and quite special sense of ‘how at instant t1 one seems to oneself to be disposed in spatial respects Ra 2 in space’. An example of this kind of causal explanatory claim would be the following: ‘At instant t1 one seems to be aware of a flexed arm because in general (and in fact over a period of decades) one takes oneself to be a being endowed with an arm-shaped part which can adopt postures like flexed, straight, etc.; and because of the operation of postural sensations (etc.) occurring at t1 ’ (the sense of ‘takes oneself to be’ being something quite other than ‘imagines oneself to be’ or ‘has the cognitive attitude that one is’ or ‘perceptually experiences oneself as’ – in fact being other than any of the familiar psychological kinds). The hypothesis is, that if in general one took oneself to be (say) octopusshaped instead, then despite having a human shape and despite the presence of posture-caused phenomena like sensations of posture, one could not have the experience of seeming to be in the presence of a flexed arm-shaped thing. Thus, the supposition is that some something (call it ‘the long-term body-image’ or ‘I’), whose content encompasses arm-shape, functions as a necessary but insufficient condition of these experiences of shape and posture. That is, that one continuously carries within one’s mind/brain certain (probably) mental ‘luggage’ that one’s mind/brain brings to bear upon the data of the moment (which is in fact probably sensational and possibly also neurological in character), whose nature is such that the causal conjunction of these several factors results in a proprioceptive perception whose spatial content in part repeats and is in any case tightly constrained by that psycho/cerebral ‘luggage’ (I). Just what kind of a thing this item I is supposed to be, and whether anything answers to it in reality, remain to be considered. And so does the validity of the above complex hypothesis. (b) The peculiarities in our concept of long-term body-image (1) Why do we believe there exists something it is natural to describe as a ‘long-term body-image’? And why do we think it is endowed with a spatial 2

Ra is more comprehensive than R, and (roughly) coincides with the spatial properties of the outside of a physical object (here, the body of the animal subject).

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content (call it C) matching the body-outside? Well, what preliminary data makes us posit that something? The first thing is, that C is common to all veridical instances of the short-term image (to all i’s, as I have called them) over an extended period – like decades. However, this common property of experiences cannot on its own constitute reason for believing in a distinct image of the body, in any natural sense of ‘image’. Doubtless the regularity demands causal explanation, and in terms of something with value C, but this still falls far short of what needs to be the case if one is to be obliged to posit anything of the kind of the long-term body-image. After all, the above complex causal property is possessed by the body itself. For in general the short-term images of animals are veridical perceptions of body presence and shape, and we know that C is common to all instances of body shape, so the regularity in question must already on that account alone be caused by something with value C, viz. the body. Clearly, there is more to the concept of long-term body-image than the inherence of value C in something which explains the regular presence of C amongst an extended sequence of proprioceptive experiences. What we are looking for at the very least is something with value C, set in the mind/brain, intervening causally between the body itself and the regularity amongst the short-term images (the i’s), and explaining that regularity. And yet it seems to me probable that the phenomenon (viz. I) we here hypothesise accomplishes something else as well. Indeed, it seems to me that the concept of body image goes well beyond the concept, ‘the whatever in mind/brain explains the regularity amongst the i’s’. (2) It takes us an important step nearer to grasping what goes into the concept of long-term body-image (I), to understand just how the latter specification still falls significantly short of the necessary requirements for I. It does so in an interesting way, which can be brought out through a comparison with the sense of sight. I begin by noting first of all that a limb devoid of all feeling is usually proprioceptively imperceivable, so that postural bodily sensations must in general help to make proprioception possible. Then secondly I also note that the visual perception of both the presence and shape of physical objects is mediated by the perception of the spatial and colour properties of the colour sensations which the objects projectively cause in the visual field and in addition by one’s knowledge of the shape and colour of the perceived object. For example, we might become visually aware of a lion through seeing the shape and colour of a complex tawny visual sensation in mid visual field and knowing the shape and colour, and thus also the visual

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appearance (the ‘look’) of lions. Then what is of special interest here is, that this is accomplished in a quite different way from that in which we perceive the body and its postures through experiencing an array of proprioceptive sensations and having a long-term body-image. Several features of the visual situation find no analogue in proprioceptive situations. In particular: A. The parts of the immediate perceptual datum (here, the visual field) can be differentiated and ordered without employing the perceived material object as individuating framework. Thus, I might individuate a point in my visual field either as ‘tawny and at midpoint in my visual field’, or else as ‘tawny and directly out in front of my head’. (By contrast, we individuate proprioceptive sensations by positioning them in relation to the outside of the material object they make perceptible, which is to say in the subject’s own body.) B. The secondary quality or sensation (here, the colour tawny) mediating the perception of the (lion) material object is not as such of any specific material object, nor as such of any specific type or shape of material object, nor as such of material objects at all – a tawny section of the visual field being susceptible of multiple interpretations. (By contrast, proprioceptive sensations are given to their owner as of his unique, determinately shaped, human body.) C. Many points are perceived that fall a perceptible distance away from the perceived (lion) object: for example, all the other points in the visible scene may be parts of a green and verdant ‘ground’. (By contrast, we do not feel bodily sensations outside our own body.) (3) We are trying to explain why it is that we hypothesise the existence of something we call a ‘long-term body-image’. Then it is clear from the above comparison that if there exists some kind of image with value C mediating the causal transaction between the body and the proprioceptive perceptual-contents or the i’s, that image must have a radically dissimilar function from that of any visual mental picture with lion-shape value in determining the visual perceptual singling out of a lion from within the visual field. While the latter event of perceptual discrimination consisted in the imposition of a spatial structure upon a sector of a wider continuum that is endowed with an autonomous spatial structure of its own, the former seems rather to consist in the acquisition of a structure for what otherwise would lack structure and indeed being. This bodily image seems not so much something perceptually discerned in its object, as something which is at once truly instantiated in its object and yet imposed somehow from within.

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The peculiarities of the proprioceptive situation that determine this divergence in function between the visual image or knowledge of the look of a lion and the long-term image (of a body), stem above all from the vitally important property A (above). Here we encounter a unique situation in perception, and a very strange one at that: namely, the revealed (material object) constitutes the very system of ordering/individuation/differentiation of the revealer (bodily sensations). This property is a direct corollary of the immediacy of proprioceptive perception: the fact that proprioceptive sensations do not attentively mediate the perception of the object they help make perceptible; for if they did, they would have an ordering system that was independent of their object. In short, they would constitute something akin to the visual field. (c) The origin of the concept of a long-term body-image Then how did we come by this unusual concept? I do not believe it was merely on account of the fact that a regularity may be discerned in the short-term images over an extended period. Its origins lie deeper. I think it all begins in the following way. It arises out of the fact that the very existence and general veridicality of proprioception stands in need of explanation. There is a puzzle as to how such a phenomenon as proprioception can so much as exist, which will soon become apparent. To begin let us remember that since bodily sensation is a necessary condition of almost all proprioception, bodily sensation must help cause proprioception and must help therefore to explain its veridicality. Now the bulk of the content of proprioception is the spatial state of the body. And yet how can bodily sensation help to generate such spatial content? And how can it help to explain the veridicality of that content? One theory – which we have already considered at length – is that bodily sensation occupies much of the body-outside when proprioception occurs, that this entire complex of spatially ordered sensation maps reliably onto the body-outside, and that awareness of these sensations and their spatial properties is epistemologically prior to awareness of the body and its space. In short, bodily sensations are said to make possible and explain proprioceptive spatial content, first by bringing to awareness its own shape, which then secondly is said to mirror that of the body. This theory would fill in the lacuna between efficacious bodily sensations and proprioception, and would in addition explain how proprioception is possible. It is a representational theory. However, such a theory faces overwhelming difficulties. Thus, sensations require a framework of differentiation, and even in the

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case of sight the body helps to satisfy this need through providing directional differentia for visual sensations, while in the case of bodily sensations there can be no doubt that the body provides the differentiating framework for the sensations. It follows that the spatial properties of bodily sensations cannot be the epistemological foundation of the spatial content of proprioception. And in any case, relative to what would these epistemologically prior sensations acquire a place in space for their owner? If we say relative to the body, we are thinking in a circle, while if we say relative to nothing, how can spatial differences be given to the perceiver? The conclusion must be that a sensation-representationalist theory of proprioception is false, and that bodily sensations come in the first place to awareness with body-space as the required framework of location, differentiation, and individuation. It is at this point that the aforementioned puzzle concerning proprioception appears. Whence the spatial content of proprioception if not via that of postural sensations? Whence that content, particularly if bodily sensation is the means through which we experience such a content? This is the puzzle, and it requires a drastic solution. The only way out of this difficulty is to posit a massive contribution on the subject’s own part to the formation of the content of the proprioceptive experience – something which ought in principle to be possible, bearing in mind that in proprioception we continually perceive one and the same object throughout our entire lives. It seems therefore that we ourselves must bring that spatial content to the proprioceptive experience, and do so upon receiving the stimulus and data provided by proprioceptive sensation. More exactly, remembering that sensations mutate as posture alters, we must bring all of the space that we encounter in proprioception – minus the differentia of posture. It is, I think, in this way that we come by the theory of the long-term body image. Once we recognise the untenability of sensation-representationalism in proprioception, such a theory seems unavoidable. Only thus can proprioception be made intelligible. 2. filling in the concept of the long-term body-image (1) We arrive via this route at the concept of a something (which we are calling I) permanently ensconced in the mind/brain, endowed with a relatively rich spatial content, and playing a significant part in the determination of the spatial content of proprioception. And upon this foundation we build up in stages a richer conception of that something (I). Then as noted already in section 1, the delineation of I begins with our entertaining a complicated double hypothesis, the first part of which took the following form. We first

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of all hypothesised that there exists an entity I in the mind/brain which is endowed with the following properties at least: (i) It is natural to say of it that, in a very special sense that needs spelling out, it is of ‘how at time t one seems to oneself to be disposed in spatial respects Ra in space’ (where Ra as a general rule tends to coincide with the stable spatial properties of the surface of one’s body). (ii) The content of Ra transcends particular postures: for example, while the content includes arm and leg shapes, it excludes posture-values, such as those of being crooked or straightened. (iii) The entity I transcends one’s states of consciousness and states of aesthesia, indeed one’s psychological states generally. That is, a man will retain this image, he will in the special sense seem to himself thus-shaped (etc.) when comatose or stunned, and were it (improbably) to be the case that some drastic brain event switched off all sensation (and proprioception) while waking consciousness continued unabated. More, it would survive an attack of madness in which he seemed to himself to be an octopus. (iv) The contents of this entity (I) tend to change very slowly, generally paralleling changes in actual body size and shape: the image may be presumed to change its dimensions during the time of our life when we are growing, and to change its shape during adolescence or maybe somewhat during pregnancy and very likely over the decade in which we became hugely fat. So much for the first hypothesis (the hypothesis of an inhering I). The second hypothesis – which is explanatory in type – is that the something (I) answering to the above characterisation, when it is conjoined with certain phenomena of the moment which probably include the sensational and/or cerebral effects of posture, helps causally to explain the short-term body images of the moment. That is, I helps to cause the short-term image ix at each instant tx . Then if something answers to this dual specification of the phenomenon (I), if something actually has the above constitutive and causal properties, such a something will be what we are calling ‘the long-term body image’. But if nothing does, the concept and usage fizzle out. (2) Let me now expand the characterisation of the hypothesised long-term image. Since, apart from content, its properties are almost entirely causal, and since these causal properties pertain mostly to origins, I will begin with an account of its origin properties. The hypothesis is that I is largely innately determined, but exhibits a malleability at the hands of protracted coordinated experience. More

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specifically, it seems on the one hand unlikely that natural developmental alterations, such as growing or the changes of adolescence, are going to find themselves represented in the body image solely as a result of coordinated motor-perceptual experience; and even more unlikely that the representations of the presence and shape of one’s limbs (e.g. fingers) can be largely the product of experience. It is on the other hand simultaneously hypothesised that experience, and therefore one’s own personal experiential history, leaves its mark on the image of the present moment. The supposition is, that especially in the case of novel, and most of all unnatural shapes – such as a newly acquired hump, which could not have been genetically anticipated, sustained coordinated experience can enable their incorporation in the image. This malleability at the hands of experience might be thought to have functional, and therefore also selective, value for the individual in facilitating veridical proprioceptions and therefore accurate intentional manipulations of the environment. In sum, I have hypothesised the existence of three kinds of origin-factors: changelessinnate (e.g. fingers), developmental-innate (e.g. growing), and experienceacquired (e.g. hump, corpulence). To these I add what might be described as conditions of persistence: for example, the property of transcending postural change, indeed body shape of the moment, together with psychological states generally, including states of consciousness and aesthesia. To learn that I is such as to be unaffected by sudden changes of body shape or states of aesthesia, is to learn something significant about its conditions of existence. The richness of the origins of I attests to its links with genetics and personal history. By contrast, the effect-property of I – there seems to be but one – is indicative surely of natural function. The conjectured effect of I is (as I have already noted) that it causes the short-term body-image ix of the moment tx , when assisted (in all probability) by two kinds of contemporaneous phenomena. The first of these agencies is the standard effect of present posture, notably postural/kinaesthetic sensations and maybe also certain cerebral effects; while the second may well be short-term memory of recent movement, bearing in mind the effect upon proprioception of protracted immobility. That is, the explanatory half of the double hypothesis is that I, together with certain contemporaneous effects of present and immediately past posture, causes the proprioception of the moment. The upshot of these several causal hypotheses is that I proves to be a natural device whereby the changeless innate, the developmentally innate, and a certain past history wherein the contingencies of development find due

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recognition, are brought to bear upon the data of the present and immediate past, in generating the proprioception of the moment. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this causal hypothesis is that the present body shape is simply bypassed in this causal transaction, and that present posture is merely associatively operative! Despite being the object of perception, it is not directly operative in the causal transaction! Here we have a dramatic unlikeness to the visual perception of shape, and an eccentric phenomenon to be accommodated by the Causal Theory of Perception! 3. the t ype and ontological status of t he long-term body-image But what kind of thing is the long-term body-image? In particular, is it a psychological phenomenon? A preliminary note of caution before attempting to come to grips with these two questions. In speaking of the long-term body-image, I remarked earlier that it is (in a special sense yet to be spelled out) ‘how at a certain time one seems to oneself to be in spatial respects Ra ’ (Ra being the stable outside spatial properties of one’s body). Then it has at this point to be admitted that this sentence is somewhat misleading. Whatever variety of ‘seeming’ it is we are talking of, it can be none of the familiar psychological ‘seemings’: it is not a perceptual experience of a certain shape, nor an imagining-of or imagining-that one is possessed of some shape; indeed, it is no kind of experience at all. And neither is it a cognitive attitude with such a content, whether we are thinking of a belief, an expectation, an inclination or tendency to believe, and so on. And in fact we ought to abandon any attempt to fit the long-term body-image into any familiar psychological box. It is not just that it is wrong. By importing the element of psychological self-reference, with its overtones of self-consciousness, as these concepts inevitably do, such an approach suffers in addition from the fundamental failing of construing the body-image in far too elevated terms. In reality, we are dealing here with something extremely primitive. There can be no doubt that in the less overtly mentalistic sense of ‘body-image’ that is my concern, the bodyimage is present in animals of all kinds and all levels of compexity in precisely the sense it is present in rational self-conscious adult humans. In my opinion, we simply ought not to assume that it is or that it is not psychological in status. Let us for the moment agree that it is cerebral at the very least. And let us note in passing that there is, as I observed earlier, another phenomenon worthy of the title ‘long-term body-image’, which unquestionably is psychological in status, and is almost certainly a form

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of imagining. ‘Many anorexics have a distorted body-image’ undoubtedly refers to some such imaginative phenomenon: in short, to something vastly less primitive than the body image that is our concern. What properties can one cite which might help us to determine the type and status of the less overtly mentalistic body-image? It is ringed in with causal properties, some of which are surely of definitional import. These properties ought to provide a lead on the two questions above, in particular upon the issue of ontological status. So let us review those properties. Now I hypothesised the long-term body-image as: something at least cerebral, with relatively fixed content C, mostly innately determined – whether developmentally in advance (e.g. breasts) or so to say timelessly (e.g. fingers), but malleable in ways by protracted coordinated experience (e.g. hump); and having the unique and vitally important function of being such as to cause ix when assisted by the postural/kinaesthetic sensations of the moment (and possibly also by short-term memory of just-passed shortterm images). It is plain that the latter functional causal power is centrally important to I’s being the kind of thing it is, and it seems probable that malleability at the hands of protracted coordinated experience is also of near central significance. Then it is noteworthy that the long-term image is thus defined in terms of causal properties which link it above all to psychological phenomena, such as proprioceptive experiences and bodily sensations. This suggests the likelihood of its being a dispositional property that is cast in psychological terms, and presumably therefore of its being psychological in status. It may be that I is a disposition to harbour ix ’s at the instigation of the postural/kinaesthetic sensations sx . More exactly, I define I (with content C) as a differential causal element in the genesis of ix ’s that manage to realise C-content. It is not just that I and sx cause ix (with content matching the posture Px of the moment): I is hypothesised as responsible for the realisation of C-ness in the latter ix which has a content matching Px . These considerations lead me to assume that I is psychological in status. 4. the univocalit y of ‘long-term body-image’ (1) The long-term body-image is hypothesised as a necessary causal intermediary between present postural/kinaesthetic bodily sensations (and/or cerebral effects of posture/motion) and present proprioceptive perceptions of body presence and space. Meanwhile I have also claimed that the long-term body-image is a necessary condition and thus a causal agency, in the generation of veridical perceptions of the location of bodily sensations (indeed,

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that it constitutes the answer to the puzzling question as to how this is accomplished). Might the long-term images involved in these two causal transactions be different phenomena? Might these non-identical definite descriptions, these indirect identificatory causal recipes, single out different items? I shall argue against this view. That is, in support of the theory that ‘long-term body-image’ is univocal in ‘The long-term body-image is a necessary condition of immediate proprioceptive perceptions of presence, posture, and motion of limbs’, and ‘The long-term image is a necessary condition of veridical perceptions of sensation location.’ My claim is, that one and the same I makes these veridical phenomena possible. (2) I believe we misunderstand the nature of the long-term body-image if we suppose that any empirical phenomena could demonstrate the existence of several long-term body-images. In general the long-term body-image is veridical: animals of all kinds successfully manoeuvre their way in the environment, and accurately enough (say) flick away irritating insects from their body (without looking), etc. These achievements require that their agent be apprised of the spatial properties both of limbs and of tickles and suchlike. And in general most animals veridically perceive these existents, whether body parts or bodily sensations, as endowed with the objective spatial properties they in fact have. Such veridical proprioceptive perceptions depend upon the existence and veridicality of an inhering long-term bodyimage. But veridical long-term images represent body parts and surfaces as where in body-relative physical space they actually are. Then how could there be several veridical body-images? Since we locate bodily sensations precisely in the body, and the body in the space occupied by physical realities generally, it is difficult to make sense of the idea of multiple veridical images. Then how could we suppose that there might be one long-term body-image for active limbs and another for sensations? We must never lose sight of the fact that representationalism is false of proprioception, that bodily sensations are located by the mind absolutely immediately in parts of the body, and that in proprioception there is no analogue of the visual field. In a word, no autonomous bodily sensationsystem exists with an ordering principle that is independent of the bodyobject they bring to awareness. I suspect that confusion on these matters underlies the supposition that one long-term body-image might determine proprioceptive perception of body-space, and a second long-term image govern the perception of ‘sensation space’. It is easy to feel that in the very first place bodily sensations come to awareness as standing in certain spatial relations to one another, and only secondly find themselves assigned by the

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mind to particular limbs. Such a state of affairs would seem to open the door to the existence of separate representational schemas for sensations and limbs. 5. is the long-term body-image an a p r i o r i post ul ate? (1) The justification for positing a long-term body-image (I, as I call it) begins with the fact that a common content C exists in all short-term bodyimages (the i’s, as I call them) over an extended period. This justification is immeasurably strengthened by the consideration that, while the content of proprioception is largely spatial and while postural (etc.) sensations cause proprioception, postural sensations cannot be the original bearer of spatial content in proprioception. Accordingly, I hypothesised the existence of an I with spatial content C, transcending posture and psychological states of all kinds, which joins with the postural/kinaesthetic sensations sx of the moment tx , and maybe also with cerebral events and short-term memory of the immediate past ix – ε , to cause the ix of the moment. Now this hypothesis is a purely empirical explanatory hypothesis. And so it cannot possibly be construed as a priori necessary. And yet it seems to me that once we assume the presence of certain vastly familiar features of the animal condition, the postulation of a long-term body-image is forced upon one with something resembling necessity. At the very least, possession of a long-term body-image is a deeply embedded element in animal existence as we know it, indeed is a kind of foundation stone of that phenomenon. The demonstration of this claim is the aim of the ensuing discussion. (2) Since the hypothesis of a long-term image, of an I, is an empirical explanatory hypothesis, alternative hypotheses ought to be possible. I propose at this point to advance such an alternative, and draw out the implications of that hypothesis with a view to establishing the above claim concerning the centrality of I to animal life. The following possibility comes to mind. Let us suppose it was the case that all points on the body-outside cast a verisimilitudinous literal physical image of some kind in the brain, thanks to the mediation of certain neurological events, an image which constantly mutated as body-posture changed. Let us also suppose that the content of this 3D image (which we shall call I3D ) automatically determined matching immediate bodily perceptual ‘seemings’, even though the latter will be cast in the spatially impoverished respects that are typical of proprioception generally. Finally, let us assume that these are all the immediate body perceptions that exist.

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If this was how matters stood, we would I suggest have no grounds for postulating a long-term body-image: its explanatory rationale would have ceased to exist. And much else would vanish along with the long-term image. For example, a natural conservatism in relation to one’s own bodily being would be supplanted by a permanent readiness for ‘revolutionary change’. Thus, were it to be the case that one’s body suddenly rebelled against the constraints of nature and adoped an octopus shape, then all of one’s immediate bodily perceptual ‘seemings’ would instantaneously acquire an octopoid spatial character: one would not, so to say, recognise oneself from the inside! And the past would drop out altogether as a causal determinant of present bodily perceptual content. And so too would innate or genetic determining factors. Spatial content would be constantly renewed, instant by instant, in this wholly ahistorical account. Everything causally relevant would be at once literally physically superficial and in the ‘here and now’. (3) Certain difficulties begin to appear for this theory. The ahistorical character, the possibility of sudden octopoid body ‘seemings’, are disconcerting to say the least, but not I think essentially unintelligible. The first real problem arises when we ask the question: how necessary is it, in the supposed generation of body ‘seemings’ by the literal image I3D , that it act in conjunction with the bodily sensations of the moment sx ? One’s first thought is that it can hardly be necessary. I can see no binding reason why an anaesthetic perception of the body should not in principle exist. But this does not prove that we can dispense both with sx and I in arriving at bodily ‘seemings’ of the kind of the short-term image ix . For what we are specifically asking is whether, in the absence of I, the perceptual phenomenon that we call ‘ix ’ might be possible. That is, an event endowed with the complex property of being at once a perceiving and immediate and with a spatial content matching that of normal proprioception – and in addition endowed with the further vitally important property of giving to the bodily will its immediate bodily object. (For this is the prime and natural function of proprioception.) But we should remember that ix is also the phenomenon that we call ‘proprioception’. And we know that proprioception possesses the above vital property. Then might I3D manage to cause proprioception of the limb? Might I3D manage to lead to the instantiation of the above vitally important complex property via this particular route? Perhaps so, perhaps not. But if it is to do so, it cannot but make use of the postural sensations of the moment

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sx . This is because proprioception is an immediate mode of feeling one’s limbs to be present and disposed in a certain way. After all, our discussion concerns the proprioceptive mode of realising the property of giving to the bodily will its immediate bodily object. But if we do thus opt for the proprioceptive mode, we have no choice but to assign a perceptual role to sx . (4) The question then arises: might I3D (rather than I), acting in conjunction with sx , manage to conjure up a truly proprioceptive ‘feeling it so’, namely ix ? Here another difficulty stands in the way. It is that of managing simultaneously to involve sx essentially in the perceptual transaction and discover a function for sx which confirms that involvement. Then I think we should consider the cognitive function of sx . For after all, how could sx ensure a perceptual ‘feeling so’ and shed all cognitive import? If the attention is to pass ‘feelingly’ via sensation onto a limb, surely the ‘feel’ sx must relate to that limb in a manner which accords with a regularity of some kind, and therefore through a relation bearing cognitive import. These considerations lead me to conclude that if a properly proprioceptive ‘feeling it so’, if a true ix is to be caused by 13D , then sx will have to be of cognitive significance – and thus capable of interpretation. More, since representationalism is false of proprioception and the content of proprioception is largely spatial, sx will have to admit of a non-projective spatial interpretation. That is, sx will be thus interpreted by something present in the subject’s mind/brain. This latter item must be such that, acting in conjunction with sx , it automatically interpretationally generates the ix of the moment. And this is in effect to say that the something in question must be close in character to the long-term body-image (rather than to I3D ). Thus, once we opt for a truly proprioceptive ‘feeling’ perception of the body, such as would give to the bodily will its immediate body object, and once we recognise the inapplicability of sensation-representationalism in the case of proprioception, we are more or less compelled to posit a long-term body-image. I conclude that the long-term body-image is as deeply embedded in animal existence as proprioception. To be sure, it is no kind of a priori necessity. However, once we introduce into the scene such fundamentals of the animal condition as proprioception and the bodily will, it is strictly unavoidable. (5) Here is a diagrammatic representation of the origin of the proprioceptive experience ix of the present moment tx . I have opted for the near necessity of the historical theory set out in Fig. 22.

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event causes

(timeless) innate factors short-term image ix

long-term image Ix (by time tx ) (developmental) innate factors ix−ε

short-term memory of ix−ε

Σsx

(possible) protracted coordinated experience posture Px

long-term pre-tx

immediately pre-tx

(present) tx

Fig. 22

6. conclusion (a) The immediate object of the will I entered upon this entire discussion of bodily willing through considering the question: why cannot we will phenomena in extra-bodily objects? The following emerged: it is because we do not stand to such objects in the special cognitive relation that is required for action; and because we are not linked to them by an act-mechanism; and because we lack ‘feel’ in them. Then since I had already examined the cognitive and mechanistic requirements of action in Part I, I chose in Part II to concentrate upon the factor of ‘feel’. Why must we ‘feel’ in the object in which we will change? The answer is: it is because the object must, in a sense which I spelled out, be ‘immediately

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present’ to one. The will can act only upon those objects which, through the agency of ‘feel’, are in a certain special sense ‘immediately given’. But if ‘feel’ mediates willing thus, might not the will first and before all else act upon something that is composed of ‘feel’? Might it not act upon a sensuous image of the limb? Might not such an entity be the immediate object of the will? I rejected all these suggestions. Then what is the immediate object of the will? It has emerged that it is not the body-image, whether erroneously conceived in phenomenal sensuous (‘sense photo’) terms or properly understood as i or I. The immediate object of the will is the material object in which the willed phenomenon takes place. More, it is a material object that is mapped in the short-term and hence also in the long-term body-image, and veridically so in either case. Now the long-term body-image has several functions. It is in the first place to expedite the transition from s1 to i1 . As a result, it is thereby to generate the presence of the internal framework through which sensations of all kinds are locatable and individuatable, and in that way to make possible nothing less than perception of the World – and all that follows from that! It is also simultaneously to act as a realistic constraint upon the types of i’s that are projected in intentional action – for we are aware of our determinate physical character partly in order to intervene actively in the environment, and a necessary condition of willing change in an object is that the object be veridically internalised in the short- and long-term body-images. This latter requirement transcends the narrower suggestion that the object be part of one, for it can encompass both those cases in which the object is part of one yet not given for the will and not part of one and yet open to the will. It was above all this truth, more important even than the binding cognitive and mechanistic requirements of successful willing, that the whole of Part I has been striving after. (b) Dual aspects of the will Now the reader will recall that at the beginning of chapter 5 I attempted without success to explicate the need for ‘immediate presence’ in willing, in terms of the fact that (i) all willing is a willing of change in oneself, and (ii) the self is necessarily immediately given to the conscious self-conscious agent. While this was an error, it is now possible to state the truth that it misrepresented. It is clear that self-consciousness can have little light to shed on bodily willing as such, seeing that bodily willing occurs in all forms of animal

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life. And yet it has emerged in the course of this discussion that the immediate givenness of oneself to oneself is decidedly relevant to the physical will. For it is only because the agent is immediately and non-experientially given to himself as determinately material, which is to say in the long-term body-image, and thereby immediately and experientially given to himself as disposed in a certain fashion, which is to say in the short-term bodyimage, that a part of that self can be singled out for the will to act upon. If the physical will is to engage successfully with the body, it must act upon a phenomenally given part of oneself that is differentiable within a stable veridical primordial image of oneself as determinately material. Thus, an absolutely immediate awareness of oneself as determinately material is at least a necessary condition of the form of immediate awareness of a limb that is a necessary condition of willing change in that limb. It is in this sense that the absolutely immediate givenness of the self to the self is relevant to the physical will. Let us now consider the special situation that obtains in the selfconscious. Here the subject is cognitively and non-experientially given to his self-conscious self with absolute immediacy, simply through being conscious. And this is a cognitive access to his own being as a conscious being. Simultaneously he is experientially given to himself with fallible immediacy as a result of bodily ‘feel’, and this is an immediate phenomenal access to his own being as material object (viz. in i), resting upon a nonexperienced awareness of himself as determinately material (viz. in I). So at any particular moment the self is given to itself as endowed with two quite general traits: one as a conscious being, the other as a determinately shaped physical something: from the inside, and from the outside. And it is the latter non-experienced givenness of the self to the self from outside, as I, as a determinately shaped physical something that characteristically endures through and thus transcends the continually mutating i’s, and that one continually and of necessity carries around with one and cannot even for a moment shed, that makes possible i and hence a differential ‘immediately present’ object for the will.

Index

a posteriori concepts 112–14, 122–4 a posteriori-given application conditions for concepts 78, 93, 112–15, 122, 165 a priori concepts 112–14, 122–4 a priori-given application conditions for concepts 78, 93, 112–15, 122, 163 absolute idealism 9 act capacity (‘power’) and concepts of linguistic ‘use’ 103 and act-mechanism 151–2, 162–5, 184 and ‘feel’ 137–8 as act-condition 151–2, 162–5, 179 tests for 119 act-desire 35–7 and non-act-desire 37 and naturalistic theory of man 8 as force 35–6 as origin of action 56–8 determinacy in 271–2 act-mechanism 62, 69–73, 106, 141, 145–54, 162–3, 181–3 and conditionals 153–4, 156 and power 164–5 as validating event as willed 153–4 reconciling with action 143–60 passim act types and essences 58–60 action and causation 35–7 and control 38 and energy 45–6 and epistemology generally 29–34 and error 150–2 and ‘internal prompting’ 135, 139, 141 and life 19–22 and mechanism, see act–mechanism as directed event 107–10 as mediator 11–14 as never happening to one 38 as processive 65 as psychological 109–10, 123, 161

as willing change in oneself 184 experience of 155–6 functional primacy of 19–23, 28 general characteristics of 36 immediate awareness of 56–7 in mind 29–32 intention and test for 120 intrinsic senselessness of physical 42 necessary psychological origin of 56–8 need for theory of 4 ontological duplicity of physical 43, 157–8 ontological ambiguity of 117–18 origins of 56–8 over-emphasis on intentional 41–2 pre-scientific singling out of 112–16 present-day import of 3, 11 activeness as de re essential trait 54–5, 58–60 ‘adherence’ of sensation to seeming body 240–1 affect 39 after-image physical location of 211–13 projective location of 212–13 animal essence of 28 life and death of 5–7 animality of man 268–9 Anscombe, G. E. M. 1 anxiety 10, 71 and ‘nerving oneself to act’ 70–1 artefacts and intentions 40–2 atomism 16 attention and body 182–4, 248, 250–2, 254–5 ‘attunement’ of animal to others 25–8 awareness of body for will 172–4 of visual sensation for visual experience 173–4 Beethoven, L. van 10 behaviourism and denial of will 46

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300

Index

behaviourism (cont.) and physical act mediators 12–14 as progressive 16 significance of 25–6 belief and mental act types 65–6 discontinuity of supposed willings of 60, 65 essential inactiveness of 61, 76 irrationality of supposed willed examples 61–4 manipulating in self 63–4 unwillability of 60–7, 74, 76 Berkeley, G. 251 blind, visual sensations in 176, 216–17 blinking 119 body and body ego 264 as ground of tactile perception 174–7 as unique target for will 74, 76, 84–5, 89, 99, 107–9, 124, 171–3, 181–4 experiencing in toto 246, 255–6 ‘the given’ regarding one’s own 188, 198–202 internalised (‘seeming’) 239–42 space of 174–7 uniqueness of for owner 174 body ego 264 orality and 265–6 rationale of 270 body-image 241–98 passim and body-ego 264 and location of sensation 211, 269–71 and projection 211 completion of vs enlargement of 268 constraints on concept of 262–3 imaginative sense of ‘body image’ 290–1 in ‘body sense’ vs world-image in seeing 239–42 introducing concept of 262–4 long-term as a posteriori postulate 293–5 and Causal Theory of Perception 290 and falsity of sensation representationalism regarding body 286–7, 292 and regularity amongst short–term images 284 and self-consciousness 297–8 as constituted of primacy qualities 273 as constraining active projects 278–9 as generator, with postural sensations, of short-term 274–80 as meeting need for physical determinacy in own eyes 272–80 passim distinct from imaginative body-image 290–1 enriching concept of 287–90 hypothesis of 283–5

innate knowledge of content of 288–90 ontological status of 290–1 origin of concept 286–7 peculiarities in concept 283–6 primitiveness of 290–1 stability in 277–9 veridicality of 272 and maps 266–8 and projection 269–71 as psychological primitive 243 myth-laden concept of 246–7 need for concept of 246–8, 265–73 short-term, and aesthesia 271–3 as dependent on long–term 275–80 as mutating and vanishing 273–4 and regularity 274–8 ‘body sense’ and attention 182–4, 246, 250–5 as ground of tactile perception 174–7 information gained by 250–5 and sense-perception 247–55 Bradley F. H. 9, 17 brain as site of essentials of life and death 6–7 life of, and life of body / of man / of mind 6–7 breathing 119 Bruckner, A. 9 Byron, Lord. 10, 11, 34 causation 47 and action 35–7, 56–7 and experience of bodily sensation 236–7 and projective location of bodily sensation 229–34 and projective location of visual sensation 225–9 and validating events as willed 142, 149–54, 164–5 Chaplin, C. 108, 121 character alienating concept of 14–15 and body-image 277 and freedom 14–15 and noumenal self 14 dissolution of 14 indeterminacy of 15 physical act mediators of 12–15 Charcot, J.-M. 10 Claude, Lorrain 32 cogito and experiencing one’s body 184–5 as caused by self-consciousness 184–5 as ‘explicable transparent immediate’ knowing 134 as grounded on nothing 184

Index Coleridge, S. 34 conditionals and ‘power’ 170 consciousness and will 29–34 function of 20–4 importance of in 17th/18th century 3 necessarily non-psychological origin of 31 contextual constraints on use of natural-kind terms 80–2, 89–92 on use of physical act expressions 89–92 criteria concept of 163–6 of natural-kind terms 92 ‘cross patchwork’ of sense-surfaces 221, 225–7 Davidson, D. 1 death impossibility of psychological explanation of 7 of mind; as essence of death of animal 6–7 death instinct 10 and enlarging concept of will 9–11 Descartes, R. 47, 192, 195, 199, 261, 269 desire 56–7, 72–3 and action, see act-desire and epistemology 31–2 importance of in naturalistic conception of man 7–9 non-act variety 37 disease 71, 81 and works of the mind 11 mental 11 disembodied existence and vitalist dualism 6–7 dreaming absence of bodily will in 173–4 and consciousness 30 as imaginative experience 2–3 as inactive 29–30 as puzzling source of linguistic misuse 84 as thinking in the non-wakeful 28–30 dual aspectism 42–4, 297–8 dual aspects of self 297–8 dualism 43 and will 47 vitalist 6–7 ego and action 37–8 and body-image 264–8, 271–2, 277–80 and will 38–9 and will-power 38 Einstein, A. 84 emotion 59 environment and life of mind 23–4 epiphenomenalism 43

301

epistemology and action 29–35 and human nature 31–2 and instinct 31 of mind-to-body 1, 172–5 error, act- 150–2 estrangement ‘from above’ 17 ‘from below’ 17 evidentialism, radical regarding own body 188–200 passim experience of acting 155–6 explicability of willed events 141–4 ‘explicable transparent immediate’ knowing 134 extending extension of natural-kind and act expressions 82–4, 89–97 exteriorist theories of bodily action 157–8 extra-bodily items and scope of will 74–7, 89–90, 94–7, 104, 121, 167–8 ‘feed-back’ regarding present action 186 ‘feel’ and act-capacity 137–8 and action 180–1, 264 and body-image 263–5, 296–7 and ‘immediate presence’ of body 185–7, 263–5 feeling, bodily (sensation) as constraint, with long-term body-image, upon intentional projects 278–9 designation of 191 movement and position of 196–202 in point of application of bodily will 137–8 over-interpretation of 194–5 ‘skin’ of 199–200 ‘feeling’, sense of 189–93 freedom and self-knowledge 88 Freud, S. 7, 10, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 32, 49, 84, 265 function of mind and consciousness 19–24 functional primacy of intentional bodily action 19–24 genius 83–4 ‘given’, the 16–19, 188 as encompassing world 24–9 in relation to own body 187–202 passim, 235–7 priorities and 200–2 God 3, 47, 268, 269 hallucinations (visual) as non-visual experiences 210–11 Hampshire, S. 1, 43 health 10–11 hearing and auditory sensation 204–5 and orientation 176–7

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Index

Hegel, G. W. F. 26 Heidegger, M. 18, 269 Heisenberg, W. 84 Hemingway, E. 15, 22 Heracleitus 12 Housman, A. E. 11 human nature as natural forceful 11 polarisation of 10 theory of 8–10 Hume, D. 12, 14, 18, 47 Huysmans, J. K. 9 ‘hypostatised interiority’, myth of 246–7 hysterical phenomena 57 identification and action 35–6 illusion, argument from regarding will 46–7 illusions regarding own acts 150–2, 157 regarding own body 181–7, 262 regarding sense perception 150, 204–5 regarding visual space 225–9 imagination as aid to extending use of words 82–3 immediate object of bodily will 172–3, 181–5, 203–4, 235–7, 252, 256–60, 264, passim, 297 ‘immediate presence’ of body 181–7, 247–51 passim, 264–5 impulse, raw 264–6 inactiveness as de re essential trait of some mental phenomena 54–5, 58–60 individuation and action 38 instrumental action 85, 98, 103–16, 119–20 passim and ‘nerving’ onself to act 70–1 and willing belief 61–7 contrasted with ‘immediate will’ 97–8 ‘radical volitionist’ discrediting of 105–15, 118–20 intention and artefacts 40–1 as act-cause 45 as meaning-giver 41 efficacy of as act-test 120 intentional physical action and knowledge of future 127–35 passim, 167 and mechanism 134–5, 141, 167 assembling concept of 97, 115–25 passim, 167 body-image and 264 ‘feel’ and 137–9, 141, 167–8, 189–1, 264, 279– 80 functional pre-eminence of 19–23, 40–2 over-emphasis on 41–2 intentionality 188

interiorist theories of bodily action 154–7, 191–4 most extreme 261 internal organs and will 167, 181–4 ‘internal prompting’ and action 135–6, 141 ‘intuitive’ knowing 131–4 Kafka, F. 71n Kant, I. 14 kinaesthetic and postural sensations 189, 192–3, 197–9 as cause of body experience 201 as co–given with body and space 192–3, 200–2 concept of under strain 194–7 as constraining active projects 278–9 non–representational role of 251–5, 286–7, 292 sense in which in space 194–9 knowledge a-conceptual practical 257–9, 263–5 and cogito 134, 184–5 and will generally 19–21 explanation of 128–35 passim ‘explicable transparent immediate’ 135 function of 20 ‘intuitive’ 131–4 kind appertaining to intended future 127–35 ‘occult’ 133–4 varieties of 134 Kripke, S. 81, 124, 163 laughter and non-act-desire 37 and reason 37 as inactive non-intentional 37 life and concept of human nature 4–5, 8–10 and ‘health’ and ‘sickness’ of mind and its works 10–11 criteria of 92 definition of 5 dualism of 6–7 ‘given’ and 18–19, 28 import of 24–5, 28 of animal 4–7 of body 4–7 of brain 4–7 of man 6 of mind 4–7 of vegetable 6 limits of will and romanticism 48 and sceptical-realism 48–9 bodily 84–7, 89–93, 264 by body-image 264 by ‘feel’ and mechanism 141–4, 184–5, 296–7

Index logical, on will’s extension 55, 60–73 passim, 159–60 on will’s objects 55, 60–73 passim, 159–60 ‘metaphysical’ 76–7 location, variegation of senses of 212 location of bodily sensation 199–203 passim actual physical location 213–14 projective location 217–20 and body-image 242–3, 270–1 and causal considerations 224–34 and error 221, 229–34 and experience (’seeming’) 221, 224–5, 239–43 and location of sound 219–20 and sense fields 221–2, 229–43 body as unique site 218 criteria of 237–9 difficulty of question 219–20 explanation of 234 fixing concept of 220, 224 provisional criteria of 223–4 spurious criteria of 220–3 Locke, J. 92 long-term body-image, see body-image magic 123–4 as primitive model for will 48 Mahler, G. 11 Malraux, A. 71n man as deity 8–9 as natural force 11 as ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ 11 as world-oriented 23–4, 28–9 ‘attunement’ and ‘sociality’ and ‘togetherness’ of 25–8 de-naturalisation of 9–10 life and 6–7, 11 shift in metaphysical conception of 7–11 map body-image likened to 265–8 practical of environment 34 ‘markers’ of natural-kinds 78–84 of physical action 86–90 materialism 1, 43–4 Matisse, H. 9 meaning 12 and use 15–16 intention and extra-mental 40–1 of a life 15 meaning-givers 11–12 estrangement: ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ 17 means-ends and action 135–6

303

mechanism and action, see act-mechanism mediators of meaning sceptical ‘small’ metaphysics of 17–18 significance of shift in 28 turning away towards 11–12 mental 13 ‘private property’ and 13 mental actions and thinking 29–31 as de re essentially active 54, 58–60 limited variety of 65–6 ontologically unlike physical 117–18 mental illness 11 and mind’s death 6–7 mental image 210–11 unprojectibility of 245 mental schism and willing of belief 64 Merleau-Ponty, M. 174, 235 ‘metaphysical double vision’ 72 ‘metaphysical fact’ 142–3 ‘metaphysical limit’ to bodily will 76–7 ‘metaphysical’, pejorative use of 74–6 ‘metaphysical use’ of ‘I can do ’ 103–9, 121–3, 141–4 attempting to explain 99–109 passim mind as core of vital system 25 as force in nature 8–11 as ‘private property 13 death of 6–7 function of in man 19–21 life of 6–8, 20, 24 nature of 5–6 proximity to body in physical action 40 unity of 3 vital function of 19–23 mind-to-body epistemology 1–2, 172–4 and ‘body sense’ 249–58 and sense perception 173–8, 257–9 experiencing the body 183–4 ‘feel’ and 181–4, 187–202 passim, 246–9 ‘the given’ regarding own body 187–203 passim, 235–7 ‘immediate presence’ of body parts 184–7, 246–9 passim mind-to-body problem 1–2 constituent elements of 2 theories regarding bodily will 39–40, 43 minima visibilia 251 miracle, willed events as 142–4 ‘missing link’ example of extending will 167–8 misuse of words and contextual constraints 80–2, 84 and verbal recommendations 106–21, 168

304 misuse of words (cont.) concerning dreams 84 concerning will 84 of natural-kind terms 80–4 passim, 89–91 Mozart, W. A. 38 musculature and act-mechanism 145–8 Nagel, T. 43 Napoleon 38 natural history of action theory 43–5 natural-kind words act-expressions and 77–9, 86–95, 111–13, 161–4 contextual constraints on use of 80–2, 84 development in usage of 189–90 extending extension of 82–4, 89–93 injudicious use of 80–1 learning use of 78–9 ‘markers’ and 78–84 misunderstanding 80–4 misusing 80–4 passim 90–2 ‘nerving oneself to act’ 70–1 and anxiety 70–1 and instrumental action 70–1 Nietzsche, F. 11, 23, 160n noumenal self and character 14 objects of bodily will 171–4, 180–7, 235, 296–7 extra-bodily 74–7, 84–6, 89–91, 97, 104, 124–5, 171–4, 180–7, 235, 296–7 ‘ontological descent’, from mind to body 2 ontological indeterminacy of action 117–18 ontological ‘two-facedness’ of physical action 157–8 orality and body-ego 263–6 organs, bodily function of 21 internal and will 167, 181–4 orientation in perception 176–7 body and 176–7 hearing and 176 other minds 18–19 and solipsism 25–9 and solitude 26–7 as second to life 19, 24–9 as second to world 24–9 pain contingent unwillability of 76 de re essential inactiveness of 55–60 Parmenides 12 perceptual-mechanism 62 ‘phantom limb’ 221–3, 247, 259–61 and failure of sensation to project 218

Index philosophical elucidation of concepts vs a posteriori discovery of essence 91–3, 124–5, 161–3 physical actions acquiring concept of 86–94 as akin to sensations 42 as ontological ‘go-between’ 41 assembling concept of intentional 112–17 passim, 161–3 body-image and 264–5, 271–3, 278–80 cognitive properties of intentional 125–35, 167 ‘feel’ and 180–1, 264, 278–9 functional pre-eminence of 39–42 intentional, see intentional physical action intrinsic senselessness of 42 ‘markers’ of 86–90 Picasso, P. 9, 268–9 plant, life and death of 6 ‘plenitude’ of bodily sensation and body-image 240–1 point of application of bodily will 171–4, 180 power to act, see act-capacity practical knowledge of limb posture 257–9 ‘practical photograph’ of limb 257–9 ‘private objects’ and radical evidentialism regarding own body 190–1 processive character of action 65 progress in philosophy 16 projection concept introduced 215–16 experiencing 270–1 impossibility of projecting thoughts and images 245n of sensations : bodily onto body-image and body 214–19, 223–4, 233–8, 243, 269–70 visual onto visibles 215–18 prosthetic limbs 168 Proust, M. 11 ‘psychological essentialism’ 57–60 psychological phenomena as uniquely essentially vital 4–6 will-value as essential 54, 58–60 psychological space and visual sensations 215–18 Puccini, G. 10 Putnam, H. 78, 81, 113, 124, 159, 163 reason, in mind 61 Rembrandt 176 Renoir, A. 22 representationalism, inexistence of sensation representationalism regarding one’s own body 286–7, 292 romanticism and ego 38 and idealisation of will 8–10

Index and magical libertarian theory of will 48 decline of 8–10 Rothko, M. 176 Ryle, G. 160 Sartre, J.-P. 14–16, 30 Schopenhauer, A. 1, 10, 23, 29, 43, 83, 162 science and extending use of words 82–4, 91–4 self and cogito 184–5 dual aspects of 297–8 focal point of 268 no immediate experience of 184–5 noumenal and character 14 self-consciousness and body-awareness 184–5 and cogito 184–5 and long-term body-image 297–8 ‘attunement’, ‘togetherness’, ‘sociality’ as conditions of 26–8 conceptual linguistic conditions of 113 sensations 55–60 as ‘bare particulars’ 190–2 as cause of body-awareness 235–6, 251–3, 262, 279–80 as co-‘given’ with body 200–3 body-image as framework for individuation of 286 general characteristics of 206–7 hysterical inexistent 57 inexistence of sensation representation of body 286–7, 292 kinaesthetic and postural, see kinaesthetic and postural sensations location of, see location of bodily sensations projection of 214–18, 223, 233–4, 242–3, 269–71 psycho-somatic 57–8 senselessness of 42 space of 193–5 visual 2, 205–7 sense-datum and bodily action 107n, 108n sense fields and ‘plenitude’ of sensation 239–40 sense-impressions 206–7, 262–3 sense perception 175–7, 187–8 and attention 247–54 and concepts 186 compared with ‘body sense’ 247–50 general characteristics of 248–50 regularities and 253–5 theory proposed 204–7 sense-space, visual psychological 207–9, 214–16

305

senselessness, intrinsic of physical actions and sensations 42 Shakespeare, W. 63n short-term body-image, see body-image sickness, of mind, of theory, etc. 11 simplest possible animal 19–21 skin surface as recipient of projections of surface-sensations 234 as of side-recipient of side-sensations 234 epistemological pre-eminence of 234 ‘small metaphysics’, scepticism and 17–19 ‘sociality’ and self-consciousness 26–8 solipsism 108 and life’s causal processes 23–6, 27–8 and other minds 24–7 and ‘small metaphysics’ 18 and withdrawal to mediators 18 solitude, limiting extreme of 26–7 sound-location vs sensation-location 219–20 space ‘body sense’ perception of body 257–9 of sensations 192–8, 286 visual sense 205–9 speech-pragmatics and act-mechanisms 145–7 Spinoza, B. 43 spirit, will as in motion 35–7 spiritualisation of bodily action 98 standpoint to own body 264 Strindberg, A. 11 ‘super science’ and a priori concepts 112–14 philosophy as 112–14 surprise, absence of in intentional action 127, 130, 149, 153–4, 186 tactile perception and physical action 32–3 and world-map 32–4 as based on non-sense-perception of body 174–7 import of 174 representational theory of 2, 175–8 sense in which primary amongst senses 32–3 tactile sense-field, inexistence of 236–7 thinking and action 117 and consciousness 29–30 and dreaming 29–30 as active 29–30 Thomas, Dylan 169 thought, the, as giving objects 186–7 unprojectibility of 245n ‘togetherness’ and groups 26–8 touch, see tactile perception

306

Index

transcendental ego 185 trying activeness of 54 simplicity of 103–4 to move extra-bodily objects 103–4 to try 72–3 unwillability of 72–3 varieties of 99 unconscious, the 22–3 ‘unreflective physicalist realism’, theory of bodily action 179–80 use of words and act-capacity 103–4 and contextual constraints 80–4, 90–3 and meaning 15–16 and misuse 84 and ‘verbal recommendations’ 105–22 passim facts underlying 114–17 ‘verbal recommendations’ and actions 105–22 passim, 168 and deleting instrumentalist usages 105, 107–12, 119–22 and ‘radical volitionism’ 105 and scientific development 111–21 passim as expressing metaphysics 105, 111–14 verificationism cautionary note on regarding mind 25–6 and functional priorities in mind 23–5 and mediators of meaning 12 Vermeer, J. 32 visual depth and role of mind in perception 2, 207–10 and two-dimensionality of sense field 2, 207–10 visual experience 173–4, 210–11 and action 31–3 and hallucinations 2–3, 210–11 and human nature 32–3 visual field and seemings 224–9 and sense-fields generally 216–17 orientation of 176–7 two-dimensionality of 207–9 visual hallucinations 2–3, 210–11 visual mental images 211 unprojectibility of 245n visual perception and regularities 249–51, 253–4 by electrons 176 elements of 206–7 of depth, see visual depth orientation and 176–7

role of sensation in 205–9 rudimentary form of 176 theory of 2, 204–10 visual sensation causal considerations and 225–6 in blind 176–7, 215–16 physical location of 213–14 physical origin of 57 projective location of 214–16, 237 reality of 204–6 role in visual perception 206–9 two-dimensionaliy of 205–10, 216–19 visual space 225–9 vital function of animal mind 25–6 vital instinct 19 Vlaminck, M. de 9 volitionism as insightful 109–11 and mind-body schism 44–5 most extreme theory of 261 radical 92, 98–9, 104–11, 120–4, 159–61, 176 varieties of 95–6 and verbal recommendations 105, 109–12 Wagner, R. 9 will a priori limits on extension of 55–60, 76 broadening concept of 45 conflict within and estrangement 10 and consciousness 29–30 as directed 109–10, 172–3 disillusionment over 9–11 and dualism 47 and epistemology 29–34, 172–4 and experience of body 171–4 and individuation 38 and knowledge-use 19–22 and limitation 48–9 and magic 47 and romanticism 7–9, 47–8 as expressive of act-desire 34–8 as necessarily depending on seeming-target 171–2 as never happening to one 38 as psychic force 8 extreme interiorist theory of 261 general characterisation of 34–7 limits of, see limits of the will natural primitive theory of 47 objects of, see objects of bodily will point of application of bodily 171–4, 180 reality of 45–7 strength of 38–9 will-power 38–9 ‘will-value’ 55, 62

Index as de re essential trait of psychological phenomena 55–6, 58–60 generic determination of 58–60 ‘willed’, definition of (see glossary) 53–4 willed phenomenon explanation for 139–40 ‘willing of ’ definition of (see glossary) 53–4 unwillability of 67–73 willing of extra-bodily phenomena 74, 76–7, 84–7, 97–9, 125–41, 168, 264, 296 Wisdom, John 72, 75, 112 Wittgenstein, L. 1, 12–16, 18, 25–6, 71, 74, 77, 111, 149, 186, 190–1

307

work 38 world and action 24–9 and body-image 266–8 and sense perception 239–43 as necessarily linked to mind 19–24 commitment to 19 gathering of for infant 33–4 image of in seeing vs body–image in ‘body sense’ 238–40 map of 33–4 primacy of for animal 28–9 Yeats, W. B. 9