All Things Are Full of Gods, page 15
PSYCHE: Precisely. Really, we’re talking about much the same thing. Subjectivity is already “semantic”—that is, it’s always already an awareness of things under the aspects of meanings or purposes, signs and significances—and yet semantics exists only for a subjective awareness. Though a good deal of analytic philosophy of mind blunderingly separates consciousness and intentionality into distinct faculties—the one concerned only with sense experience, the other only with propositional content—they’re in fact inseparable. One doesn’t experience a quale without the mind attending to it as a sensation, indicating some source—identifiable or not—of that sensation. To be conscious involves recognition, being aware of what is and also of what might be but isn’t—affirmations of what things are and negations of what they’re not. Meaning and awareness exist each in such intensity as the other does; and, as either fades away, so the other disappears with it. I think, if I were asked to determine these things, I’d speak of this inseparability of consciousness and intentionality simply as “attention,” just as, for instance, Nicholas of Cusa does.15 And I’d identify this attention as the mind’s fundamental act. As we’ve discussed, to be subjectively aware is to be aware of one’s own awareness, and so one’s every act of conscious thought toward the world is also already an intentional directedness of the mind toward its own agency.
HEPHAISTOS: [Throwing up his hands in mock helplessness:] Now you’re being anything but lucidity itself, my good Psyche. I mean, yes, I understand that awareness of a thing increases to the degree that one is specifically thinking of that thing as what it is. One is more aware of a tree in the moments when one is attending to it mentally as a tree and as a tree that happens to be standing just there, rather than when perceiving it in passing, as some background feature that one isn’t thinking about directly. And perhaps one is still more conscious of it under the aspect of, say, an elm, rather than merely under the general designation “tree.” And I understand that one can perceive that tree as a tree, and reflect upon it both in its general “arboreality,” let’s say, as well as in its individuality as a concrete object only to the degree that one’s consciously aware of it. That all seems undeniable, and I follow you to that point. But then there are experiences that don’t seem to correspond to any prior intention at all, such as, say, an unexpected shock of pain or a feeling of generalized anxiety.
PSYCHE: Both of which are conscious experiences only because the mind directs itself at them under finite aspects. Moreover, as far as conscious experience is concerned, the unexpected is experienced as unexpected only because it’s a modality of a prior expectation: to wit, the failure of that expectation to be correctly fulfilled. You must have intentional expectations, after all, for them to be thwarted. That a momentary experience can fail to correspond with one’s intentionality is itself the effect of that intentionality.
HEPHAISTOS: [With a wince of amused incredulity:] And what, pray tell, does that mean?
PSYCHE: It seems to me obvious that we experience anything as something particular only either through a prior expectation that the experience confirms or through an expectation that it fails to confirm. I think it’s obvious that we receive the world through a kind of constant expectancy—a kind of “active patiency,” so to speak, that reaches out to the world. And I think this is both specific and general. There’s an expectancy regarding, say, that tree we were talking about. Perhaps I expect it to be an oak, and only when it fails to fulfill that “meaning” do I have to revise my expectation according to another meaning, and finally assign the tree to the category of “elm.” And then there’s a more general expectancy, turned toward the world as a whole—an expectation . . . an intention toward truth, toward the world as understandable, which causes my mind always to venture forth into the world in search of the aspects of things, under which I might grasp that truth. Without that . . . that ecstasy toward the world as an intelligible whole, we could experience nothing as anything at all. I mentioned Husserl earlier. He was brilliant in his analysis of how intentionality—how a kind of constant purposiveness, attentiveness, and expectancy—is necessary even to interpret the content of sense-impressions, through both the harmony of expectancy and experience and the dissonance between them. You know, even a shock of pain takes a moment to register as pain, doesn’t it? A moment in which the mind turns toward that shock and interprets it so that it fits within an intelligible ordering of experience . . .
HEPHAISTOS: It’s interesting that you think pain needs to be interpreted.
PSYCHE: To the degree that’s it’s fully conscious, it does. I don’t even think this is all that extraordinary an observation, or that it concerns anything unique to supposedly higher organisms. I’m quite sure that animals too must adjust their intentionality in accord with experience properly to make some kind of sense of it. For us as conscious users of signs, of course, who interpret things according to meanings in the fullest sense, the experience comes to have specifically the meaning “pain,” which we understand in a more abstract sense, even when we can’t immediately identify it. For us, there’s that additional level—or those several additional levels—of intentionality. But nothing that counts as real cognizance—real recognition—is possible apart from some level of intention. Again, even cognitive dissonance isn’t wholly non-intentional. You experience it precisely as a disruption and failure of a prior intention within a continuum of intentions. And to overcome that dissonance, you have to rely on your memories of successful intentions, at some level of generality or specificity. I mean . . . well, take for instance, that goblet you summoned up a little while ago. Nectar, I assume. What though would you have tasted had you brought it to your lips expecting nectar but instead, inexplicably, it had been filled with goat’s milk?
HEPHAISTOS: [With a shrug:] I’d have tasted goat’s milk—which I heartily detest.
PSYCHE: No, as a matter of fact, you wouldn’t have—at least, not at first. Your first impression would have been sheer cognitive dissonance. Your initial sensations wouldn’t have immediately coalesced into a recognizable flavor. At first, you would have registered only that part of your original intentions had been fulfilled—it was liquid—while the rest of them had been thwarted, and your intentionality would have interpreted the dissonance for you as somehow wrong. Only after mentally retreating from the experience and approaching it again with new, broader expectations, severed from the specific intention of tasting nectar, would you have been able to recognize it and integrate it into a remembered series of past experiences. Till that moment it wouldn’t even have tasted like what it was to you; the sensory data conveyed to your brain would not yet have assumed the form of the flavor of goat’s milk in your mind. Even the qualitative character of your experience is dependent on mental intentions.
And the same is true, once again, of your perceptions. Consider optical illusions, such as that one you can see either as two human profiles in silhouette facing one another or as a vase in outline, as you choose to see it. You will it to have the meaning it will have for you, and then in consequence you see whichever of the two objects you consciously intend; and, of course, you can switch back and forth between them as you like. To me, that fact is impossible to make sense of in physicalist terms alone. Again, the mind knows nothing in pure passivity, simply as the recipient of a physical cause. It’s always at work investing perception with determinate content. Consciousness is a kind of artistry actively, purposefully composing its perceptions out of what would otherwise be an undifferentiated storm of sense-impressions incessantly impinging upon our senses, sheer cascades of causal sequences without discrete aspects or clear delineations, and without any exact beginnings or endings.
HEPHAISTOS: You’re really certain, are you, that all of this is intrinsically irreconcilable with a physicalist narrative of reality?
PSYCHE: If that reality is understood mechanically. Can’t you see how even this small but singular fact—that you can direct your mind to perceive an image as one thing or another—renders a mechanistic picture of intentionality almost perfectly preposterous? You physicalists are the ones who say the material order is intrinsically devoid of purpose and meaning, or of intentionality or final causes. It’s all just infinite undifferentiated eventuality for you, incessant exchanges of energy between instances of mass, infinite change at infinite speed. Intentionality is the opposite of all of that. It’s finite, for one thing, directed at things under very particular aspects, with very particular limits; it partially halts or crystallizes the pure flow of sensation, containing it in stable islands of enduring form amid the flood of sensory experience; that’s how it isolates objects of attention, and interprets events and things in determinate ways. It’s also entirely purposeful, an agency elicited by final causes, both individual and general.
HERMES: If I might interject something . . .
PSYCHE: Please.
IV
Language
HERMES: The effect of intention on sensory data is interesting, no doubt, but surely the most conspicuous expression of intentionality of all is language. Yes, we interpret everything. We see a plume of smoke as a sign of fire. We see an expression crossing the face of a friend as indicative of displeasure. But in these instances it’s easy to mistake what we’re doing for something continuous with a mere system of stimulus and response. It’s only in the full range of our semeiotic capacities that we see the obvious difference between intentionality and anything reducible to the physical interactions of our neurology with our environment. Language is nothing but intentionality, purposive meaning communicated in signs. It’s a world alongside the world, so to speak, or a plane of reality continuously hovering above the physical plane, a place in which meaning is generated and shared entirely by meaning. We can talk about—and so conceive of—realities that aren’t present in any physical sense at all. We can discuss abstractions that have no material existence, let alone the power to impinge on our nervous systems. The very reality that I can use signs to communicate something to you, or can receive a message from you by understanding the signs you use, seems to me more than enough evidence of intentionality’s transcendence of physical causality.
PSYCHE: Quite so. I didn’t want to begin with language, however, because of that aforementioned habit on the part of some analytic philosophers of segregating conscious experience and intentional meaning into different, unconnected faculties. But you’ll get no disagreement from me. The world of signs and symbols and meanings and purposes—the world we inhabit and can’t really depart from, except perhaps in moments of psychosis or delirium—simply isn’t the world of mechanical causality, and simply couldn’t have emerged from it without violating the mechanical laws supposedly underpinning it.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, I’m glad the two of you are in agreement—or the three of you, I have no doubt. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. I, however, as yet demur from Brentano’s judgment that intentionality is the singular “mark of the mental.” I mean, I know that you think physical nature isn’t mechanistic and that it actually is full of a kind of intentionality, since mind underlies and pervades all things, and the physical world is somehow thought made concrete . . . or something like that.
PSYCHE: Something very like that, in fact.
HEPHAISTOS: Whatever that may mean. All right, then, let’s for the moment presume that intentionality as you describe it actually exists, and can’t be reduced to non-intentional explanations. For argument’s sake, I’ll temporarily grant the premise. What, though, if one were to argue that signification—meaning—is in some sense present in physical systems even in the absence of mind?
PSYCHE: Such as?
HEPHAISTOS: Well, if nothing else, certain phenomena are so causally connected to one another that perhaps one could say in some cases that one “means” the other. For instance, smoke in a sense “means” fire, even in the absence of any putatively intending intellect. Paul Grice, if I recall, used precisely that example. Or perhaps any device that carries information of any kind exhibits a kind of intentionality, if only of the barest kind, as Fred Dretske has suggested: perhaps the mercury in a thermometer rising to the mark for 75° Fahrenheit or the needle in a compass pointing toward magnetic north might constitute a purely physical instance of elementary intentionality, since it already “means” or indicates something beyond itself. Perhaps the intentionality of mind, if freed from the mystifications in which you’re trying to wreathe the question, might be a far more developed expression of this same capacity on the part of physical systems to be oriented toward specific ends, or at least significantly—signifyingly, as it were—attached to them.16
HERMES: I must assume you already know how poor such arguments are.
HEPHAISTOS: Please, be so good as to instruct me on what I know. I’m often several paces behind even myself, poor lame-footed god that I am.
PSYCHE: No need to be snide—either of you. But no, Phaesty, I can’t grant what you say. I still insist that intentionality is situated uniquely and incommutably in minds. I don’t even grant the propriety of John Searle’s seemingly benign attempt to extend the proper designations of the word outward from the mind.
HEPHAISTOS: I’m not familiar with that.
PSYCHE: Searle speaks of three kinds of intentionality. The first, the sort of mental orientation we’ve been discussing, he calls “intrinsic.” To this, though, he subjoins the categories of “derived intentionality”—that is, the significance a mind directly invests in external objects like words, signs, maps, diagrams, or thermometers and compasses, which other minds can discover by correctly interpreting those objects—and then “as-if intentionality”—which is little more than the pathetic fallacy or mere fancy: a metaphoric ascription of purposiveness to intrinsically non-intentional phenomena, such as when a poet speaks of the rivers “seeking” the sea. Not that Searle is unaware that maps and diagrams and the like, considered purely as physical objects, mean nothing, or that rivers—at least, according to the mechanical picture of nature—intend nothing, and merely flow as gravity dictates. Still, even that attenuated use of the word seems like a solecism to me, as it might suggest that somewhere, somehow there’s some subtle continuity between what the mind does in intending and what mindless physical forces—if such things exist—are doing, and that the two are to be distinguished not absolutely but only by ontological degrees. That’s nonsense.
So, if I’m unwilling to concede the legitimacy of that kind of, oh, “diffused” intentionality, even as a seemingly harmless façon de parler, then I’m certainly not prepared to entertain the claim that smoke means fire in the absence of an intending mind, or that one can mystically dilate that kind of supposedly purely physical indicativeness into something somehow proto-psychic, which agonizingly, over epochs of unimaginably numerous epochs, was alchemically transformed into purposive thought. Smoke may result from fire, but it means fire only in the mind of someone observing it and interpreting it specifically as a sign of something other than itself. There’s no such thing as what Grice calls “natural meaning.” And as for “information,” that too, if we’re not using the word equivocally, exists only in the intentionality of a mind. The notion that a thermometer or a compass somehow exhibits elementary intentionality is about as obvious an example of the fallacy of displacement—of Narcissus—as I can imagine. As physical objects, the mercury in a thermometer and the needle in a compass indicate nothing at all. Thoughts can be directed at physical things; but, if physical things are mechanical, they can’t be reciprocally directed at thought. Not even brain events “mean” anything apart from that mental directedness. As I said, intentionality is there or it isn’t; and it isn’t anywhere except in mind. That “aboutness” truly is the “mark of the mental,” and it indelibly marks the mental as irreducible to the physical.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, if language is the purest expression of intrinsic intentionality, what of instances of natural language that have been divorced from any conscious subject? I mean, would you deny that a sentence printed on a page possesses intentional content—and therefore intentionality—apart from any mind? That it still means what it means even when no one’s reading it?17
HERMES: Of course not, at least not intrinsically. Excuse me, Psyche, I don’t mean to answer for you; but, for myself, I have to say that the question simply repeats the same error of displacement. In the absence of an intending mind, there’s no such thing as a sentence. There may be physical marks on physical pages, but they possess no meaning whatsoever, let alone some kind of incipient form of intentionality. Sentences have meaning within an intentional space of meaning, but not “out there” in the physical order.
HEPHAISTOS: So, if a book falls open in a forest and there’s no one there to read it, does it constitute a text?
HERMES: Not if by “text” you mean the intelligible content of words and phrases with meanings. In that case, then no indeed. As a purely physical event within a mechanistic universe, a book is no different from a stone.
PSYCHE: I agree.
HEPHAISTOS: What, however, if we talk not about natural language, but about something still more basic? What if there really is, as you insist there isn’t, a kind of physical substrate to the use of language right within the neurology of the brain and body? Or at least within its functions?
PSYCHE: Functions? That’s a rather flirtatious sort of word, isn’t it? I mean the way it remains in the general proximity of the language of intentional agency while teasingly staying just out of reach. Are you saying there’s some sort of impersonal linguistic function at work in our brains that’s already in some sense intentional, from which our language-use emerges . . . ?
