What happens when an adult male – because
women did not philosophize in ancient Greece – begins to reflect over the
conditions of his existence and his way of being in the world? He will begin
with what is immediately present and obvious. I see, hear, smell, taste, and
sense the things and events in the world that is external to me. I also
perceive events that happen internally like my thoughts and feelings. All the
internal events seem to be immaterial and private in the sense that they are
only accessible to me. They belong to my soul.
The conception of a soul that inhabits the
material body was of course available and widely adopted before Aristotle began
his studies on it. His great innovation was to apply a rigorous logical
analysis to the soul. He proceeded by singling out phenomena and by defining
their distinguishing properties he attempted to separate their general nature
from their accidental variation. Making discriminations and looking at the
relationships between properties thus established is still the basis of
abstraction in sciences. That was not the problem. The problem arose by his
choice of departure for the analysis, i.e., sense perception.
This seems simple and self-evident. Our
current textbooks on cognitive psychology almost invariably begin with sense perception. This is however a
perilous path. It generates all the dichotomies that have plagued psychology
for centuries. They can be readily recognized in Aristotle’s analysis of the
soul.
First, he had to answer how the senses
relate to the external objects. What do the eyes see, when they spot a boat on
the shore or perceive a colour? The boat does not enter the eye, nor does the
eye jelly get coloured. Aristotle’s solution was consistent with his general
approach to understand nature. Everything in the world is a unity of matter and
form, and what enters the sense is the form of the external thing. “The
generalization we should make about all perception is that a sense is what is
capable of receiving sensible forms without matter, as wax receives the marking
of the ring without the iron or gold…” (Aristotle: On the Soul, II, 12)
This was the very first dualist split in
Aristotle’s monistic view of the world. A number of vexing problems ensued that
brought in place other dichotomies. How can material objects transfer their
form to the senses? What happens to the form when it enters the sensitive soul?
What is the mode by which it is retained in the soul? Starting from perception
created a rift between the external and the internal. It also petrified the
distinction between body and soul, which we still have with us in the mind-body
problem.
More problems were soon underway. According
to his classificatory mode of analysis, Aristotle postulated that each sense
has the potential for receiving only a certain kind of impressions. The
defining property for each sense was framed in a pair of opposites. Thus,
seeing was discriminating between light and darkness, hearing between high and
low tones, smelling between bitter and sweet odour, and tasting discriminated
bitter and sweet liquids. Touching was problematic, because more than one
contrasts had to be allowed, such as warm vs. cold, dry vs. wet, and coarse vs.
smooth. Nevertheless, the unitary form
of external things (pragmata)
necessarily appeared to split up into distinct sense impressions.
If each sense makes up its own faculty that
handles the sense data proper to its nature, what accounts for the fact that we
do not just perceive colours, smells, surfaces or sounds? “What is it that
allows us to go beyond mere sensations of red, fragrant, and smooth and to
recognise an apple for an apple?” (Kaukua & Kukkonen, 2007) To account for
this problem, Aristotle had to postulate two cognitive faculties. The common
sense (koinē dunamis) is an internal
sense that brings the specific aspects of the form together. By employing a set
of general categories, such as movement, rest, number, shape, and size, the
common sense creates a unified perception of the external thing (aisthema).
The common sense could, however, only
account for the synthesis of immediate sense impressions. That they might be
presented as thought objects for the intellect, they had to be freed from the
immediacy of sense perception. (Frede, 2001). More internal faculties had to be
postulated. Aristotle defined Phantasia
as the faculty that retains the perceptibles as phantasmata and presents them to the faculty of intellect for
further abstraction and thought operations.
Does this not sound familiar? Modern conceptions in cognitive science
carry distinct echoes of these ancient solutions. In my next post I will give
some illustrations.
