Defending Husserl: A Plea in the Case of Wittgenstein & Company versus Phenomenology 9783110342536, 9783110342314

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Uwe Meixner Defending Husserl

Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis

Herausgegeben von / Edited by Herbert Hochberg, Rafael Hüntelmann, Christian Kanzian, Richard Schantz, Erwin Tegtmeier

Volume / Band 52

Uwe Meixner

Defending Husserl A Plea in the Case of Wittgenstein & Company versus Phenomenology

ISBN 978-3-11-034231-4 e-ISBN 978-3-11-034253-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Preface: What is at Issue? ....................................................................... v Remarks on the Method and the Manner of this Book ............................ xii Chapter I: On Imagining ......................................................................... 1 I.1 Ryle on imagining ....................................................................... 2 I.2 Dennett (and Ryle) on imagining .............................................. 11 I.3 Bennett&Hacker on imagining .................................................. 20 I.4 Husserl on imagining ................................................................ 34 I.5 Wittgenstein (in contrast to Husserl) on imagining ................... 59 Appendix to Chapter I: The German originals of the quotations from Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapter I, and remarks on matters of translation ............................................................................................ 90 Chapter II: On Knowing the Inward Mental Life ............................. 103 II.1 Against privatism and eliminativism ....................................... 103 II.2 Subjective and intersubjective knowledge of the inward mental life ............................................................................... 116 II.2.1 Ryle and Wittgenstein against introspection (reflexive experience) .............................................................................. 120 II.2.2 Wittgenstein’s argument against knowledge of the inward mental life ............................................................................... 149 II.2.3 Wittgenstein and Gorgias ........................................................ 165 II.3 The true nature of consciousness, and its true epistemological consequences ................................................. 172 II.3.1 The root of Wittgensteinianism ............................................... 200 II.3.2 Knowing one’s own mind and the minds of others ................. 209 II.4 Coda: the second-person point of view .................................... 219 Appendix to Chapter II: The German originals of the quotations from Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapter II, and remarks on matters of translation .......................................................................................... 226

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Chapter III: On Intending ................................................................... 247 III.1 A prologue: epoché ................................................................. 247 III.2 Technical intentionality-predicates ......................................... 248 III.3 The great divide in intentionality theory ––– first part: Ryle (and Wittgenstein) versus Husserl .................................. 251 III.3.1 Rylean Husserl and non-Rylean Husserl ................................. 266 III.3.2 Does Husserl’s theory of intentionality lead to idealism? ....... 279 III.4 The great divide in intentionality theory ––– second part: Wittgenstein versus Husserl .................................................... 290 III.4.1 In corroboration of the thesis that Wittgenstein is an intentionality nihilist ............................................................... 306 III.5 Dennett’s nihilism regarding intentionality ............................. 315 III.6 Bennett&Hacker’s nihilism regarding intentionality .............. 325 III.7 The Wittgenstein-syndrome in the theory of intentionality ..... 331 III.8 Wittgenstein’s profundity ........................................................ 347 Appendix to Chapter III: The German originals of the quotations from Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapter III, and remarks on matters of translation .......................................................................................... 351 Chapter IV: On the Literature ........................................................... 361 IV.1 Husserl without introspection? ................................................ 361 IV.2 On the difficulty of saying the phenomenological truth in the best possible way ........................................................... 374 IV.2.1 Thompson on reflexive (or reflective) experience, inner experience, introspection ............................................... 374 IV.2.2 Thompson on representationalism ........................................... 385 IV.2.3 Thompson on imagining .......................................................... 389 IV.3 Was Husserl an externalist? .................................................... 396 IV.4 Husserl’s theory of intentionality misinterpreted .................... 419 IV.4.1 The Bell does not toll for Husserl’s theory of intentionality ... 434 IV.5 Four views of a Wittgensteinian .............................................. 444 IV.5.1 The first view (concerning introspection) ............................... 444 IV.5.2 The second view (concerning Anscombe’s mistranslation of “Vorstellung” and, allegedly, of “Bild”) ................................. 447 IV.5.3 The third view (concerning the intentionality of imaginings) . 450

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IV.5.4 IV.6 IV.7 IV.8

The fourth view (concerning the ontological and epistemological status of imaginings) ..................................... 454 Among the blind, the one-eyed is king .................................... 460 Referentialism and anti-referentialism .................................... 466 Husserl and the Clash of the Four Giants ............................... 470

Appendix to Chapter IV: The German originals of the quotations from Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapter IV, and remarks on matters of translation .......................................................................................... 483 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 493 Index of labelled quotations from Bennett&Hacker, Dennett, Husserl, Ryle, and Wittgenstein ............................................................................ 500 Index of other quoted authors ................................................................ 507

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Preface: What is at Issue? This book is about conflicting philosophies of psychology, or: conflicting philosophies of mind,1 one epitomized by Edmund Husserl, the other by Ludwig Wittgenstein. What is at issue between the two philosophies is of paramount importance for the current philosophical debate. I proceed on the assumption that Husserl, like Wittgenstein, has a philosophy of psychology. Some of his interpreters declare that he is a Transzendentalphilosoph and therefore not concerned with the human (or any animal’s) mind; others declare that he is a logician and/or ontologist and therefore not concerned with the human mind (since this would allegedly involve him in psychologism, which he rejected). This book as a whole should amply show (to those who doubt it) that my assumption is right; I do not deny that Husserl is also a Transzendentalphilosoph, a logician, and an ontologist. The philosophies of psychology of Husserl and Wittgenstein differ widely and antagonistically, but there is some common ground. Both philosophers ––– being philosophers, not psychologists ––– were not much interested in psychological fact-finding. Both were not much interested in the genetic, or causal, explanations of the mental. Both philosophers were, at bottom, concerned with developing fundamental conceptual frameworks for the description of mental life ––– where the word “mental” is to be taken in the broadest sense. If one were to use the traditional manner of designating cognitive endeavours that are specifically philosophical in kind, then one would have to say that both philosophers were deeply concerned with revealing the (true) nature or essence of the mental ––– a kind of work that, at bottom, turns out to be conceptual reconstruction, not dissimilar to what Rudolf Carnap called “explication” (intending thereby to give a characteristic name to what is ––– on account of its reformist ingredient –

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The philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mind stand roughly in the same relationship to each other as the philosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics. But for many purposes in this book, the terms “philosophy of psychology” and “philosophy of mind” can simply be treated as synonyms.

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–– different from straight conceptual analysis, which is wholly conservative).2 In their revelatory-reconstructive conceptual work regarding the mental, both philosophers did not let themselves be simply guided by (natural) science (the only guide Carnap had in mind3), but decided to go where the (mental) phenomena themselves would lead them (Husserl, of course, even called his philosophy “Phenomenology”4 and stuck to the name, and it became a well-known trademark). However, what were the phenomena for Husserl were not phenomena for Wittgenstein ––– which fact is largely responsible for the further fact that, in labouring to reveal the nature of the mental, Husserl and Wittgenstein reached very different results, utterly different psychological world-views (so to speak). For Husserl, human (waking time) consciousness is the paradigm of the mental and the central concern of psychology. For Wittgenstein, in contrast, the central concern of psychology is human (waking time) behaviour. While Husserl’s marginalization of human behaviour is not argued for by Husserl and appears to be accidental ––– Husserl did certainly not deny that human behaviour is an important topic of psychology ––– Wittgenstein’s marginalization of human consciousness is argued for, in the way in which Wittgenstein argues (which is not the usual way), and is a central matter of principle for him. What creates the antagonism (not just the difference) between the philosophies of psychology of Wittgenstein and Husserl can now be discerned. It is no exaggeration to say that Wittgenstein’s main point in his philosophy of psychology is this: focussing on consciousness in psycholo2

Cf. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, 7-8, and Logical Foundations of Probability, 38. 3 This emerges clearly from Logical Foundations of Probability, 6-7. 4 Being philosophical in nature (and solely concerned with a priori essence, i.e., the non-contingent general structure of the Phenomena), Phenomenology is not empirical psychology. Moreover, Phenomenology is, in contrast to psychology, not a natural science ––– though it must be noted that even psychology is, for Husserl, a natural science only in a secondary, derivative sense (not in the primary sense in which physics is a natural science): it is concerned with nature in a second sense (see “Philosophy as Strict Science”, 26; concerning Husserl’s view of psychology and its relation to Phenomenology, see ibid., 31-39, and also 17). According to Husserl, “all psychological knowledge [psychologische Erkenntnis], even where it primarily concerns human individualities, characters, dispositions, sees itself referred back to those unities of consciousness [i.e., the immanent unities, the mental or psychical unities] and, therefore, to the study of the phenomena themselves and of their ways of being intertwined [ihrer Verflechtungen]” (ibid., 38; my translation; the emphasis is Husserl’s).

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gy is a fundamental mistake. Why it is supposed to be a mistake emerges even more clearly than from Wittgenstein’s own writings from Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, which is Wittgenstein’s thought made cruder ––– turned, as it were, into a hammer or battle-axe ––– but also made richer (by being variously concretely applied; it should, moreover, not be denied that in The Concept of Mind there are numerous original Rylean elements). According to Ryle, focussing on consciousness in psychology is a mistake with two closely related aspects. It is an ontological mistake, because, according to Ryle, it leads to a doubling of worlds: absurdly (it is alleged), an inner, non-physical world is postulated besides the outer, physical world (and, allegedly, many spurious problems ensue); and it is an epistemological mistake, because, according to Ryle, focussing on consciousness entails the unfortunate transfer of one’s attention away from what is in mental matters (intersubjectively) epistemically accessible to what is epistemically inaccessible (and even, allegedly, non-existent). In striking contrast, the two salient marks of Husserl’s philosophy of psychology emerging from his focus on human consciousness are, in the epistemological regard, an introspectionism that is never in any way worried that it might not be able to reach intersubjectively valid results, and in the ontological regard, a very robust mental realism5 that does not hesitate to acknowledge a rich variety of mental entities that form, indeed, a mental world (which Husserl, by the way, believed to be capable of carrying within itself ––– as its intentional correlate ––– the entire physical world; for Husserl was ––– in a very sophisticated way ––– an ontological idealist). Moreover, it is never in any doubt for Husserl that consciousness is a distinct kind of being from physical being; but Husserl, contrary to modern philosophical usage, would not call this position “dualistic”, since psychophysical dualism is, for Husserl, a detrimental naturalistic position that, 5

The expression “mental realism” ––– which is not Husserl’s, but is here used to describe Husserl’s position ––– must not mislead one into believing that Husserl assimilates mental entities to external ––– or physical ––– realities. On the contrary, already in “Philosophy as Strict Science” (1911) he warns that “[t]o follow the example [Vorbild] of natural science [here Husserl has in mind natural science in the primary sense: physics, etc] ––– this almost inevitably entails the reification of consciousness, and this involves us from the start in absurdity” (ibid., 26; my translation; the emphasis is Husserl’s). He then describes some deep differences (ibid., 26-30) between physical entities and mental ––– or psychical ––– entities, as revealed “in immanent vision [im immanenten Schauen]” (ibid., 30), that is, the “perception of the psychical [Wahrnehmung von Psychischem]” (ibid., 28), in contrast to the “perception of the thingly [Wahrnehmung von Dinglichem]” (ibid.).

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blind to the true nature of mental phenomena, actually assimilates the mental to the physical (while still treating it as distinct from the physical).6 How can it be that two rational persons reach so widely ––– indeed, wildly ––– different philosophical accounts of the mental?7 ––– Well, is not the fact this question refers to just an instance of what one would expect to come from the side of philosophy? But seriously: instead of answering the question that introduces this paragraph here and now, I direct the reader to the first three chapters of this book. Each of these chapters contrasts what Wittgenstein and some important Wittgensteinians (Ryle, Bennett&Hacker, Dennett ––– less aphoristic and less enigmatic thinkers than their common preceptor) have to say on some central philosophico6

See The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, §11 and §§ 60-65. Husserl sees mind-body dualism in historical perspective as, so to speak, a non-monistic physicalism, an oxymoron that well serves to exhibit the absurdity that mind-body dualism has for Husserl (but rest assured that today’s monistic physicalism would be even more absurd to him). Note that this interesting point of Husserl’s negative view of mind-body dualism (as given in past and present) bears a striking resemblance to Ryle’s point in characterizing mind-body dualism (in historical perspective, like Husserl) as “the para-mechanical theory of the mind” (The Concept of Mind, 64); according to the “para-mechanical hypothesis”, minds are “rather like machines but also considerably different from them” (ibid., 19). Curiously, one might put Husserl’s and Ryle’s common point in the following way: mind-body dualism is not dualistic enough to offer an adequate idea of the mind; mind-body dualism is not really appreciating the true, radical difference of the mind from the physical. Concerning Ryle, the justness of this comment is corroborated by what he says in The Concept of Mind, 329330, concluding that book with the following words: “The Cartesian myth does indeed repair the defects of the Hobbist myth only by duplicating it. But even doctrinal homeopathy involves the recognition of disorders.” 7 To boot, both complain about the state of psychology: Wittgenstein speaks of “[t]he confusion and barrenness of psychology [[d]ie Verwirrung und Öde der Psychologie]”, the cause of which is “conceptual confusion [Begriffsverwirrung]” (PhI II, xiv, 232e/232); Husserl says that “there will not be a psychology that is science of the truly psychical [wirklich Seelischen]” as long as “the idea that the psyche [Seele], its subject, is something real in a like sense as corporeal nature, the subject of natural science [in the primary sense]”, “is not revealed in its absurdity” (Crisis, §60, 216; my translation). It is not an audacious act of interpretation to propose that Husserl and Wittgenstein agree about the state of psychology, and even about the general and particular nature of its cause. Nonetheless, the difference between the two is radical: Husserl is a mental realist (in the sense qualified in footnote 5, and further described in the course of this book) and an introspectionist (in a sense described in the course of this book); but Wittgenstein is neither, and it is not an audacious act of interpretation to propose that according to Wittgenstein there is no ontology and no epistemology specific to the psychical, or mental, at all.

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psychological topics with what Husserl has to say on that same topic; each includes besides the presentation of conflicting views a (I hope) rational philosophical evaluation of those views. Today, it can hardly be doubted that Wittgenstein ––– perhaps contrary to his intentions, perhaps not ––– was, via Ryle, a crucial factor for turning the philosophy of mind onto the track of physicalism and externalism, for fostering an intellectual climate in which human subjectivity is for very many people no longer visible as what it really is and, in fact, tends to become progressively anonymous. Husserl’s writings can certainly be of help for the philosophical rediscovery of subjectivity in its fulness, more so than Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind, or Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind. Note that the project of reading Husserl with this aim in mind is not new within the phenomenological tradition: Dan Zahavi and others8 have been working on it in recent years. Unfortunately, Husserl does not present his ideas in the manner and style philosophers of the English-speaking world have become accustomed to. Allegedly there is a lack of clearness in his writings, although Husserl is certainly incomparably clearer (albeit hardly less wordy) than the philosophers of German Idealism, including Kant, and clearer than many of his contemporaries and successors in German philosophy (whether friends or foes). But a possible lack of clearness, made worse by inaccurate or awkward translation, is not the only problem here. The idea of systematicity, of system-building ––– dear to traditional German philosophers ––– is largely foreign to present-day thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition; they tend to get restive if they discern signs of a strong ambition for comprehensive systematicity, as for example an obsession with foundations and with methodology, a tendency to formulate highly abstract descriptions of grandiose projects,9 etc. All of this can be found in Husserl, in good measure,10 8

Among them also myself: “Die Aktualität Husserls für die moderne Philosophie des Geistes” (2003), “Classical Intentionality” (2006). 9 A beautiful example (for those who can appreciate great dreams) can be found in First Philosophy I, §7, 48-50, where Husserl envisions “one complete science [in the general sense, not the sense of natural science] of subjectivity” (ibid., 48), “the universal science of the subjective in its entirety, as that in which everything objective becomes conscious and can ever become conscious” (ibid., 49), which has the task “to inquire into everything related to subjects of consciousness and to consciousness itself qua consciousness of something” (ibid.), “to inquire, in a determining way, into all distinguishable genera and species of consciousness, having steadily in view the objects of consciousness [Bewußtseinsobjekte], the unities that are intended [vermeint] in consciousness itself, in this or that manner conscious in it” (ibid.). Husserl says fur-

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but will here be largely ignored. There is left enough of what should not be ignored and cannot, in reason, be ignored. Being a native speaker of German and a German philosopher myself, and tending myself to produce syntactic structures that are too complex for the present British and American academic taste, I can, perhaps, be nevertheless of help for making Husserl better understood. In the course of my efforts to do so, I severely (sometimes passionately) criticize Wittgenstein and the selected Wittgensteinians (Ryle, Bennett&Hacker, Dennett, and others), not only regarding what they say, but also regarding how they say it. Readers might take some of my criticism as a personal, and hence inappropriate, attack on those philosophers. I therefore add a caveat: In all of my criticism in this book, it is not the person I attack, but the literary persona that, indeed, bears the same name as the person, but merely emerges from ––– and is, so to speak, confined to ––– the literary text as its manifest author. I am in no position to determine to what extent the persona matches the person, and it would indeed be inappropriate for me, when doing philosophy, to be even interested in determining that. What I am interested in, particularly if I get “inflamed”, is to battle against philosophical injustice. There is such a thing ––– as far as Husserl is concerned, plenty of it.

ther: “We have sciences we call objective [objektive], and all objects [Gegenstände] fall under the objective sciences; and yet, at the same time, all objects fall also under our science of conscious subjectivity” (ibid.), which in contrast to the objective sciences, asks, regarding the objects, “what the cognizing looks like and how it is theoretically determinable, and how any possible other manner of consciousness is determinable in which such objects, and all objects, can become conscious as unities, as identical objects” (ibid., 50). Husserl sums up: “Thus our science treats everything objective as objective for consciousness [als Objektives des Bewußtseins] and as presenting itself in subjective modes” (ibid.). (All translations are mine; the emphases are Husserl’s.) ––– Compare these visions with the current actual state of the philosophy of mind, and of the sciences of the mind. 10 Perhaps this makes Husserl deserve ––– though only remotely and in a very small degree ––– the viciously biting, unjust remarks Ryle made about him and Phenomenology in a 1946 review: “[T]he great bulk of his [Husserl’s] labours was devoted to the profitless tasks of promising epoch-making results and of demarcating the subfaculties of his new science. The drafting of constitutions for future research organisations does not stimulate those who have yet to be satisfied that the promised organisations have any function. We should have been better satisfied with bigger slices of pudding and fewer pots and pans. In short, Phenomenology was, from its birth, a bore” (“Review of Marvin Farber: ‘The Foundations of Phenomenology’ ”, 223).

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My work on this book was financially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a period of four years. For this sustained support I am very grateful. Uwe Meixner

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Remarks on the Method and the Manner of this Book This book is a selective critical commentary, taking its thematic guiding posts from the philosophy of psychology and from the general philosophy of mind. It is a commentary mainly on Husserl and Wittgenstein, but also on prominent Wittgensteinians: Ryle, Dennett, and Bennett&Hacker. Regarding Husserl, the commentary ranges over a good many of the works of that philosopher, whereas regarding Wittgenstein, it focuses on his Philosophical Investigations. In defence of my not conceding to Wittgenstein a degree of variation in treated works comparable to the one I accord to Husserl, I might point to the fact that, although Wittgenstein wrote much more on the philosophy of psychology than what can be found (among other things!) in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein’s critical potential in the philosophy of psychology is well-represented there: in his official final pronouncement on the matter. The principal reason for the described asymmetry in my treatment of Husserl and Wittgenstein (which is not accompanied by an asymmetry in intensity) is, however, this: to make room, in a book still of readable size, for the views of the Wittgensteinians. These views are in considerable continuity with Wittgenstein’s and have certain unmistakable family resemblances [Familienähnlichkeiten] (cf. Philosophical Investigations I, §67) ––– hence the name “Wittgensteinians” for their proponents; they are views that are ––– in publication, or at least formation ––– younger than Wittgenstein’s, often only a few years old. The plan is to critically juxtapose not only Wittgenstein’s philosophy (of psychology) but an entire philosophical movement ––– the externalization of mind, as represented by paradigmatic exponents ––– to a philosophy which that movement must be utterly inimical to: Husserl’s (psychological) Phenomenology, which, though novel (in the first forty years of the 20th century), grew out of ––– and is in continuity with ––– the philosophical tradition since Descartes. This being the character of the book, there is a large amount of quotation in it. In order to make cross-referring easier (for example, for purposes of comparison), almost all quotations from the five main authors treated in this book11 are labelled in a certain systematic way. Here are some illustrations: the first quotation from Wittgenstein in Chapter I has, enclosed in square brackets in front of its initial quotation mark, the following: I.W1; the tenth quotation from Husserl in Chapter II has, enclosed in square brackets in front of its initial quotation mark, the following: 11

Bennett&Hacker are treated as one author.

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II.H10; the second quotation from Husserl in Chapter III has, enclosed in square brackets in front of its initial quotation mark, the following: III.H2. Just as “W” and “H” are the identification letters for quotations from Wittgenstein and Husserl, so “BH”, “D”, and “R” are the identification letters for quotations from, respectively, Bennett&Hacker, Dennett, and Ryle. Sometimes a quotation-label contains an enumerative letter, as in “I.W23a” (in this particular case, there is also a quotation labelled by “I.W23”), or as in “II.R23a”, “II.R23b”, “II.R23c” (in this other particular case, there is no quotation labelled by “II.R23”). Note that the systematic quotation-labels are –––regarding their first occurrence with attached quotation ––– in each chapter and for each of the five authors consecutive to each other without gaps. If it seems that a label-cum-quotation has been left out, the reader should look for it in a nearby footnote. (An index of page numbers for all quotations that are systematically labelled in the way just described can be found at the end of this book.) Some of the quotations have been integrated into the normal flow of the text (not according to a fixed plan, but when doing so seemed convenient), others have been set off (again not according to a fixed plan, but when doing so seemed convenient). In both cases, each quotation is followed, after the closing quotation mark,12 by an indication of the source –– – normally in abbreviation13 ––– and of its location in that source. Information in addition to page numbers ––– namely, a section- or paragraphnumber, preceded by “§”––– is provided in order to allow the localization of a quotation also in other editions than those listed in the Bibliography. With regard to Wittgenstein, it should be noted that providing a paragraphnumber ––– as for example in “PhI I, §293” ––– does not mean that the whole indicated paragraph from (Part I of) the Philosophical Investigations has been quoted (although this is sometimes the case); it does not mean this even if no omission-symbol appears in the quotation.14 Quotations from Husserl and Wittgenstein are presented in this book not only in English but also in the original German.15 In most cases, a Roman-style upper-index number (attached to the quotation-label where the quotation is first presented) refers to an endnote with the quotation’s German text, to be found in the appendix to the chapter where the quotation 12

Note that punctuation marks that are final to a quotation are usually not quoted. If necessary, the meaning of an abbreviation can be looked up in the Bibliography. 14 The omission-symbol ––– “[…]”––– is used exclusively to indicate omissions that are strictly internal to a quotation. 15 There is one exception: for I.W20a, there is only the English text. 13

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occurs;16 but frequently the German text is also already provided in square brackets right beside its English translation within the chapter itself (this is always the case with quotations in footnotes). The presence of the German originals is important for checking the translations17 ––– and all the more important in view of the fact that I translated all of the quotations from Husserl myself (though I sometimes adduce quotations from the Husserltranslations of others for reasons of comparison). I did these translations myself in order to avoid the discussion and correction of the translations of others, and in order to provide from a single translator’s perspective (my own) a translation into English of excerpts from various works of Husserl’s, from various times in his career. Quite in contrast to my policy regarding Husserl, I used, for almost all of the quotations from Wittgenstein, the original translation of the Philosophische Untersuchungen by G. E. M. Anscombe (published in 1953). Much to my surprise, I found many things in Anscombe’s ––– on the whole admirable ––– translation that could have been done better (which fact did much to reassure me in my decision to present, in the case of Husserl, my own translations; for Husserl is rather more difficult to translate into English than Wittgenstein). I have not hesitated to modify Anscombe’s translation where I thought fit; but in each case I have made the modifications apparent by providing ––– besides the German original – –– also the Anscombian original (often together with a brief explanation of why I thought this or that modification necessary or appropriate). I am well aware that there have been several editions of Anscombe’s translation, and that her original translation has not been left unmodified. Not wishing to increase my workload and that of the reader any further, I do not discuss the emendations others have made vis-à-vis those made by myself. I offer a fresh view, relying solely on my own knowledge of German and English.

16 Sometimes the place in the appendix where the German text is to be found is indicated in a way that differs from the one just described; see I.H25, II.W51. 17 German expressions and phrases have, moreover, been inserted in square brackets – –– right beside their proposed renderings ––– into the translated passages themselves (in order to show that these expressions and phrases are difficult to translate, or, say, to show that the unusualness of the English is not a product of translation but already present in the German original, or in order to show how directly in certain cases the English corresponds to the German, etc). Note that square brackets have occasionally also been used for inserting interpretive clarifications and amplifications into quotations, and sporadically also for putting the English translation of a (used, not mentioned) German expression at that expression’s side.

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The German quotations from Husserl’s works are, as a rule, taken from ––– and specified with reference to ––– editions of the Husserliana series; some, however, are taken from a separate German edition of the Fifth Logical Investigation in its original form, an edition not belonging to the Husserliana series.18 The German text of the Philosophical Investigations is the one to be found in the original 1953 bilingual edition. Mistakes in that text have been indicated and corrected (all corrections have been checked vis-à-vis the standard German edition of the Philosophische Untersuchungen). In order to avoid overburdening the critical commentary ––– on Husserl, Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians ––– with additional material, almost all of the discussion of relevant (selected) secondary literature has been placed in a separate chapter: Chapter IV, the last chapter. Readers who miss the discussion of relevant literature at this or that point in the previous three chapters may hope to find some of such discussions there. (This is especially true of discussions surrounding Husserl’s conception of intentional object and noema.) All of the discussion in Chapter IV is of a fairly extended nature (it does not consist in brief remarks and notes), with the result that Chapter IV is, like the previous chapters, subdivided into titled sections. The extended, detailed nature of my discussion of secondary literature has the consequence that while much is said about some authors, nothing is said about so many others (famous ones not excluded). Thus it may seem to some readers ––– it is indeed inevitable that it will seem so ––– that the works of too few authors have been taken into account by me, or that my selection of those that I have taken into account is idiosyncratic. I submit that the authors selected are those whose views I thought would serve to illustrate my points (usually by disagreement, sometimes by concordance). My aim was not to give a critical report on a sample of the relevant literature that might be called “representative” (such a report must be sought elsewhere, and certainly others are better qualified than I am to prepare it). The authors discussed in Chapter IV are amply quoted from (in order to present to the readers what they actually say), and since referring and rereferring to the quotations proved to be necessary, the quotations are labelled, but in a style different from the one used with regard to Husserl, Wittgenstein, and the Wittgensteinians: it is (a), (b), (c), …, with the list starting anew in each subsection. Also with regard to this latter style of 18

But references to the Husserliana edition into which the original Fifth Logical Investigation has been integrated as a subtext are also provided.

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quotation-listing, one should remember that a label-cum-quotation that is not found where it is expected to be ––– namely, in the main text of the book ––– is likely to be found in a nearby footnote.

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Chapter I: On Imagining Imagining is a central mental activity. This is true in imagining’s own right, considering the importance imagining has in our mental life. But it is likewise true if imagining is considered in its close connection to other mental activities, above all to perceiving, thinking, and understanding. The centrality of imagining is the reason why it is treated first in this book. Because of its centrality, imagining can serve as the ideal topic for introducing the issues of this book. As will soon be noticed, the considerations regarding imagining keep touching on other mental matters (mainly, of course, on those that have to do with perceiving). Illusionary perceiving, hallucinating, dreaming (while asleep), and perception-in-recollection ––– each entails imagining in the broad sense (so that a person who is, for example, dreaming is ipso facto also imagining in the broad sense). Imagining in the narrow sense, however, is entailed by none of the four mental activities just mentioned. In what follows, imagining (simpliciter) will always be imagining in the narrow sense. As such, imagining is, (a), a mental waking activity ––– in contrast to dreaming (while asleep, but not to dreaming while awake, day-dreaming, which is, indeed, a kind of imagining). It is, (b), a mental activity which is necessarily such that, while the activity lasts, the activity’s subject, the person, is at no moment experiencing the activity’s object as actually present to the subject with the properties ascribed to it in the activity at the moment ––– in contrast to illusionary perceiving and hallucinating (each of which activities is necessarily such that the activity’s subject is at each moment of the activity experiencing the activity’s object as actually present to the subject with the properties ascribed to it in the activity at the moment), and in contrast to perceiving itself and, again, to dreaming. It is, (c), a mental activity which is necessarily such that, while the activity lasts, the activity’s subject is at no moment experiencing the activity’s object as at one (past) time actually present to the subject with the properties ascribed to it, relative to that time, in the activity at the moment––– in contrast to perceptionin-recollection (which activity is necessarily such that, while the activity lasts, the activity’s subject is at each moment experiencing the activity’s object as at one time actually present to the subject with the properties ascribed to it, relative to that time, in the activity at the moment). Finally,

imagining is, (d), a mental activity which does not per se require for any of its moments t that the activity’s object has at t or at any moment prior to t the properties ascribed to it in the activity at t, or even that the activity’s object is real at t ––– in contrast to veridical perceiving and veridical perception-in-recollection. Imagining (in the narrow sense) has now been contrasted with various mental activities in its vicinity. The contrasts pointed out are, I believe, uncontroversial. What needs to be considered next, however, is not merely how imagining is distinct, in salient respects, from mental activities in its vicinity; what needs to be considered next is the question of what imagining is in itself. The various attempts to answer this question form a region of controversy. I.1 Ryle on imagining According to Ryle, [I.R1] “there exists a quite general tendency among theorists and laymen alike to ascribe some sort of an other-worldly reality to the imaginary and then to treat minds as the clandestine habitats of such fleshless beings” (CoM, 245); the truth of the matter is, according to Ryle, that [I.R2] “[t]here is not a real life outside, shadowily mimicked by some bloodless likenesses inside; there are just things and events, people witnessing some of these things and events, and people fancying themselves witnessing things and events that they are not witnessing” (CoM, 248-249). As is rather usual with Ryle, this (characteristically) robust denial is not matched by a correspondingly robust positive analysis. What is it he has to offer on the positive side? For Ryle, imagining comes in two kinds: (1) the imagining of something known to be real, and (2) the imagining of nothing known to be real. Ryle’s examples for the first kind of imagining are [I.R3] “[actively or merely passively] [g]oing through a [known] tune in one’s head” (CoM, 269) ––– that is, [I.R4] “fancying oneself humming or playing it and […] fancying oneself merely listening to it” (CoM, 269) ––– and [I.R5] “[s]eeing Helvellyn in one’s mind’s eye” (CoM, 270). Fittingly, Ryle’s examples for the second kind of imagining are also visual and auditory: [I.R6] “We can fancy ourselves looking at fabulous mountains. Composers, presumably, can fancy themselves listening to tunes that have never yet been played” (CoM, 270).

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In analysis of the first kind of imagining, regarding his auditory examples, Ryle says this: [I.R7] “Fancying one is listening to a known tune involves ‘listening for’ the notes which would be due to be heard, were the tune being really [meaning here: presently] performed. It is to listen for those notes in a hypothetical manner. Similarly, fancying one is humming a known tune involves ‘making ready’ for the notes which would be due to be hummed, were the tune actually [presently] being hummed. It is to make ready for those notes in a hypothetical manner. It is not humming very, very quietly, but rather it is deliberately not doing those pieces of humming which would be due, if one were not trying to keep the peace. We might say that imagining oneself talking or humming is a series of abstentions from producing the noises which would be the due words or notes to produce, if one were talking or humming aloud” (CoM, 269).

Also in analysis of the first kind of imagining, but regarding his visual example, Ryle offers the following: [I.R8] “The expectations which are fulfilled in the recognition at sight of Helvellyn are not indeed fulfilled in picturing it, but the picturing of it is something like a rehearsal of getting them fulfilled. So far from picturing involving the having of faint sensations, or wraiths of sensations, it involves missing just what one would be due to get, if one were seeing the mountain” (CoM, 270).

Ryle’s basic idea behind these analyses might be summed up as follows: imagining something known to be real is a thinking utilisation of knowledge (though, of course, not every thinking utilisation of knowledge is imagining something known to be real). Ryle says: [I.R9] “Going through a tune in one’s head is like following a heard tune and is, indeed, a sort of rehearsal of it. But what makes the imaginative operation similar to the other is not, as is often supposed, that it incorporates the hearing of ghosts of notes similar in all but loudness to the heard notes of the real tune [meaning here: of the tune if it were presently performed], but the fact that both are utilisations of knowledge of how the tune goes” (CoM, 269; italics mine). [I.R10] “Seeing Helvellyn in one’s mind’s eye does not entail, what seeing Helvellyn and seeing snapshots of Helvellyn entail, the having of visual sensations. It does involve the thought of having a view of Helvellyn and it is therefore a more sophisticated operation than that of having a view of Helvellyn. It is one utilisation among others of the knowledge of how Helvellyn should look, or, in one sense of the verb, it is thinking how it should look” (CoM, 270; italics mine).

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Now, it is quite true that, regarding imagining, there [I.R11] “are questions of fact with which we are not concerned. Our concern is to find out what it means to say, e.g. that someone ‘hears’ something that he is not hearing” (CoM, 270). But there is a fact regarding imagining that philosophers in search of a correct analysis of imagining just cannot afford to ignore: they cannot ignore the descriptions of imaginings that other people give, the fact of such descriptions. Here is a topical example of such a description: When I imagine hearing a tune I know to exist (though it is not now actually present to me), or imagine seeing a mountain I know to exist (though it is not now actually present to me), I do not have any expectations regarding the tune or the mountain at all. Consequently, there are no expectations of mine regarding the tune or the mountain that I know to be not fulfilled while I somehow pretend ––– to myself ––– that they are fulfilled. What I am experiencing when I am imagining those things is simply this: having inwardly (but not actually) present to myself how I know the tune goes, be it produced by others or by myself; having inwardly (but not actually) present to myself how I know the mountain looks. Accordingly, Ryle is not going wrong in connecting the imagining of something known to be real with the utilisation of knowledge and with thinking. But thinking how Helvellyn should look is not ––– not in itself, and not even if it is accompanied by pretended-to-be-fulfilled expectations ––– already imagining how Helvellyn looks (though, indeed, at least actively imagining how Helvellyn looks essentially involves thinking how Helvellyn should look); and thinking how the tune goes is not ––– not in itself, and not even if it is accompanied by pretended-to-be-fulfilled expectations ––– already imagining how the tune goes. The designation “imagining” for the mental activity that we are discussing in this chapter is surely not an accident. Inward imagery ––– mental imagery ––– is essential for imagining; imagining simply evaporates if mental imagery is left out of the picture. The problem with mental imagery is not its occurrence ––– it does occur, as everyone knows (or should know). From the cognitive point of view, the occurrence of mental imagery of the visual kind is most important; this is why imagining is called “imagining”, although its scope reaches far beyond that of visual imaging (in fantasy). Indubitably there are 4

also occurrences of mental imagery of the auditory, tactual, olfactory, and gustatory kind, as well as of the proprioceptive1 and manifest-emotional kind. The problem with mental imagery is the difficulty of answering truthfully the question of what is its true nature. The main issue in this is the question of exactly how experience that consists in mental imagery differs from, while being related to, experience that does not consist in mental imagery (-in-fantasy). But Ryle ––– in keeping with his prejudice against the inward mental life ––– is all for mental imagery being left out of the (theoretical, conceptual) picture, believing that such a measure would not hurt at all, but would, on the contrary, bring out the true nature of what is pictured, the true nature of imagining: [I.R12] “Picturing Helvellyn, so far from having, or being akin to having, visual sensations, is compatible with having no such sensations and nothing akin to them. There is nothing akin to sensations” (CoM, 266). The following quotation puts Ryle’s intentions on display and, at the same time, his polemic rhetoric that, characteristically, tends to obscure the issues rather than make them appear in a clear light: [I.R13] “I want to show that the concept of picturing, visualising or ‘seeing’ is a proper and useful concept, but that its use does not entail the existence of pictures which we contemplate or the existence of a gallery in which such pictures are ephemerally suspended. Roughly, imaging occurs, but images are not seen. I do have tunes running in my head, but no tunes are being heard, when I have them running there. True, a person picturing his nursery is, in a certain way, like that person seeing his nursery, but the similarity does not consist in his really looking at a real likeness of his nursery, but in his really seeming to see his nursery itself, when he is not really seeing it. He is not being a spectator of a resemblance of his nursery, but he is resembling a spectator of his nursery” (CoM, 247-248).

The above-quoted passage contains a mixture of trivial truth and trivial falsehood. It is trivially true that the having of mental images ––– i.e., imaging, imagining ––– does not consist in seeing images, since one obviously can have mental images without seeing them. It is trivially true that the having of mental images does not entail the contemplating of mental pictures, since one obviously can have mental images without contemplating mental pictures. It is trivially true that my imagining a tune (i.e., my imagining hearing a tune) does not entail my hearing a tune, since I obviously 1

Proprioceptive mental imagery is taken to include also the kinaesthetic mental imagery and the mental imagery of all sorts of pleasure and pain.

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can imagine (hearing) a tune without hearing that tune. It is trivially true that a person’s imagining his nursery (i.e., his imagining seeing his nursery) does not entail his looking at a real likeness of his nursery, since a person obviously can imagine (seeing) his nursery without looking at a real likeness of his nursery. And it is trivially false that a person’s imagining his nursery entails “his really seeming to see his nursery itself, when he is not really seeing it”; if a person imagines his nursery, then it does certainly not seem to him that he is seeing his nursery, when he is not really seeing it ––– otherwise he would be hallucinating, not imagining. (And, note, if a person imagines his nursery, then, normally, it does also not seem to others that he seeing his nursery, when he is not really seeing it.) Thus, there is nothing of analytic interest ––– nothing that does not fall either under the category of trivial truth or under the category of trivial falsehood ––– in the above-quoted passage. It is, however, of some philosophy-historic interest that Ryle confused visual imagining with seeming to see. In other places of The Concept of Mind (in fact, on the same page as the relevant passage in I.R13) he comes very close to realizing that imagining seeing is not seeming to see: [I.R14] “[S]he [the child] fancies she sees a smile on the doll’s lips in front of her face, though she does not see one there and would be greatly frightened if she did” (CoM, 248). Presumably Ryle would, on reflection, have agreed that the child would be just as frightened (in contrast to her actual, unfrightened state) if it (really) seemed to her that she is seeing a smile on the doll’s lips (though she does not really see one there). Ryle’s absurd confusion of he imagines seeing with he seems to see appears to have its sole cause in Ryle’s prejudice against the inward mental life. For Ryle, the inward mental life must be discredited ––– ontologically and epistemologically ––– at all costs and by all means; not always does he stop long enough to consider whether the means he employs for achieving that goal are at all appropriate. He is so much driven by his philosophical prejudice that he even confesses, inadvertently (while intending to describe his imagining a person on seeing a snapshot of him), to being frequently subject to visual hallucinations: [I.R15] “When a visible likeness of a person is in front of my nose, I often seem to be seeing the person himself in front of my nose, though he is not there” (CoM, 254). Ryle notes that [I.R16] “people tend to express this difference [the difference between imagined perceiving and perceiving] […] by writing that, whereas they see trees and hear music, they only ‘see’, in inverted commas, and ‘hear’ the objects of […] imagination” (CoM, 246). This em6

ployment of inverted commas is highly useful, and one should certainly put the words “hear”, “feel”, and “see” in the following famous statements by Joseph Conrad between inverted commas, if the meaning this author (really) intends is to be made more explicit (that is, expressed more literally) than he himself chooses to make it explicit: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel ––– it is, before all, to make you see. That ––– and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm ––– all you demand ––– and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask” (Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, in: Typhoon and Other Tales, 21; a comma has been inserted after “written word”).

The ‘hearing’, ‘feeling’, and ‘seeing’ that occur “by the power of the written word” when one is reading imaginative literature are not (nor do they entail) hearing, feeling, and seeing; in general, imagining is not perceiving, and the following piece of Rylean reasoning is indubitably correct: [I.R17] “imaging is not perceiving a likeness, since it is not perceiving at all” (CoM, 253). The ‘hearing’, ‘feeling’, and ‘seeing’ that are induced by reading are, however, analogues of hearing, feeling, and seeing. The analogy between the former activities and the latter is precisely the reason why Conrad can use the very same words which are in primary, non-analogical speech employed to refer to hearing, feeling, seeing, to refer in secondary, analogical speech to their counterparts in imagination. The relevant rules of analogical speech are implicitly known to every competent user of English, and hence Conrad’s above-quoted statements are correctly understood by every competent user of English –––– with the exception of Gilbert Ryle, it seems. For the analogy between, for example, ‘seeing’ and seeing does certainly not consist in ‘seeing’ being the (mere) appearance of seeing. A reader lying quietly on the sofa, reading Conrad’s short-novel Typhoon, exercising his imagination with the help of Conrad’s text and, accordingly, ‘seeing’ the typhoon,2 is not at all resembling a spectator of a 2 ‘Experiencing’ the typhoon is the better way to put it, since the experience of imagination that is evoked by Conrad’s writing reaches beyond ‘seeing’: “A faint burst of lightning quivered all round, as if flashed into a cavern ––– into a black and secret chamber of the sea, with a floor of foaming crests. It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship, the black figures of men caught on the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified in the act of butting. The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then the real thing came

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typhoon (contrary to Ryle’s views: see I.R13); it does certainly not seem – –– either to himself or to others ––– that he is seeing a typhoon (again contrary to Ryle’s views: see I.R13). The imagining done (or gone through) by a reader of Conrad’s Typhoon is a particularly complex example of the second kind of the two kinds of imagining distinguished by Ryle (see above): it is a complex example of the imagining of nothing known to be real (generically, of course, typhoons are something known to be real; but that particular typhoon is nothing known to be real). Ryle is rather brief, and rather less than clear, on this very important kind of imagining (see CoM, 270-271). While the imagining of an X (tune, mountain) known to be real is for Ryle a sort of unfulfilled but pretended to be fulfilled expecting to perceive X, guided by antecedent knowledge (see I.R8, I.R9, I.R10), the imagining of nothing known to be real is for Ryle ––– or so I understand him ––– a pretending to imagine something known to be real: [I.R18] “[N]ot only do the predicates by which we comment on our view of Helvellyn not attach to the manner in which we picture Helvellyn, but also the predicates by which we comment on our visualisations of Helvellyn do not attach to our visualisations of Atlantis or Jack’s Beanstalk. None the less, we pretend that this3 is how Atlantis and the Beanstalk would have looked. We are doing a piece of double imagining” (CoM, 271).

But a reader of Conrad’s Typhoon, when reading Typhoon, does not pretend that this is how the Nan-Shan and her crew under Captain MacWhirr would have survived the typhoon they were caught in (if the Nan-Shan, her crew, and that typhoon had existed). Rather, that reader is having mental images ––– in other words, mental imagery is occurring in his consciousness ––– with an unusual frequency and vivacity (thanks to Conrad’s skill as a writer). Later, the sofa may become the Nan-Shan for the reader, he may identify with a member of her crew, and he may play Typhoon. If this comes about, then the reader is doing some pretending, playful pretending, and if he is fairly young, it is even quite normal for him to engage in such activity (which may keep him ––– likely in the company of others ––– innocently occupied for quite some time). But he is certainly not pretending, at last. It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other” (Typhoon, in Typhoon and Other Tales, 276). 3 One wonders, by the way, what Ryle would have this occurrence of “this” refer to.

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while he is reading, that anything of what he is reading about is the case, or would have been the case if only the relevant existence-conditions had been fulfilled. While he is reading, he is having an exciting experience of imagination, which fully engrosses him ––– but which is at no point blotting out his perception of reclining comfortably on a sofa in a warm room, reading, from time to time letting melt in his mouth a delicious piece of chocolate, etc; there is simply no room in this pleasurable pastime for pretending. But there is room for the occurrence of mental imagery, for the having of mental images. The reading-induced occurrence of mental imagery is a major part of the difference between reading Typhoon and reading Tarski (say), and it is to a large degree responsible for the fact that the former is pleasure, the latter work. Ryle is, in effect, denying that such imagery occurs (see I.R12), but in his eagerness to be polemical he often does not manage to adequately describe just what it is that he is so vehemently opposed to. For example: [I.R19] “We have, I hope, got rid of the idea that picturing Helvellyn is seeing a picture of Helvellyn, or that having ‘Lillibullero’ running in one’s head is listening to a private reproduction, or internal echo, of that tune” (CoM, 265). A friend of experiences of imagination can simply reply to this that it is was never necessary for him to get rid of the idea Ryle hopes we have got rid of; for he never had that idea. A picture of Helvellyn would be seen on the basis of appropriate visual sensations, and without a basis of appropriate visual sensations, one is not able to see a picture of Helvellyn. But frequently Helvellyn is pictured without there being any appropriate visual sensations on which a seeing of a picture of Helvellyn could be based. Hence picturing Helvellyn can certainly not be identified with seeing a picture of Helvellyn. A private reproduction, or internal echo, of “Lillibullero” would be listened to on the basis of appropriate auditory sensations, and without a basis of appropriate auditory sensations, one is not able to listen to a private reproduction, or internal echo, of that tune. But frequently “Lillibullero” is running in one’s head without there being any appropriate auditory sensations on which a listening to a private reproduction, or internal echo, of that tune could be based; hence having “Lillibullero” running in one’s head can certainly not be identified with listening to a private reproduction, or internal echo, of that tune. Even the blunt assertion that [I.R20] “there are no such objects as mental pictures” (CoM, 254), though more to the point, does not express just what it is that Ryle must be taken to deny existing (if he is to have an interesting position): mental imagery, mental images (the existence of 9

which is, however, not easy to deny, once Ryle’s insistent misrepresentations, caricaturing and reviling fall away). For a friend of experiences of imagination ––– a believer in mental images, in the occurrence of mental imagery ––– can reply to Ryle’s last-quoted assertion without contradicting himself in any way: Yes, indeed, there are no mental pictures. When I am straightforwardly imagining something, I am certainly not aware of seeing a mental picture, nor am I aware of contemplating in any other sense a mental picture ––– not when I imagine, say, Dorian Gray, and not even when I imagine the picture of Dorian Gray. Now, while I am imagining Dorian Gray and his picture, I can adopt the reflexive stance and contemplate my imagining Dorian Gray and his picture, directing my focus of attention to what is involved in this ongoing imagining of mine. This is how I become explicitly aware of the fact that, in imagining Dorian Gray and his picture, I am having mental images, or in other words: that mental imagery is occurring in my consciousness. But even when I am in this imagination-reflexive state ––– in which I am still imagining Dorian Gray and his picture, but no longer imagining them straightforwardly ––– I am still not aware of contemplating mental pictures, namely, such as are appropriate for imagining. Just as I am not aware of contemplating mental pictures ––– namely, such as are appropriate for perceiving ––– when I am perceiving, in a perception-reflexive state, President Obama and his picture, let alone when I am perceiving them straightforwardly. Mental pictures are mental representations, and I am not aware of dealing with mental representations, neither when straightforwardly imagining something nor when imagining something in an imagination-reflexive state. Thus, as far as I know from my own experience, I can wholeheartedly agree with Ryle (see I.R20): there are no such objects as mental pictures. But this does not mean that there are no mental images. It must, however, be admitted that sometimes Ryle manages to deny the existence of mental images in a non-misleading way. Whether it was clear to him or not, the denial of the existence of such images is at the very heart of his position on imagining. It is a denial he shares with Wittgenstein (at least that denial is one thing towards which Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is gravitating) and with other Wittgensteinians. Besides I.R12, one can 10

point, for example, to his attack on Hume. Hume, according to Ryle, supposed, [I.R21] “wrongly, that to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ is to have a shadowsensation, which involves the further error of supposing that there could be shadow-sensations” (CoM, 271; the brackets around the relative clause that are present in the original have here been deleted; regarding the use of “inverted commas” in I.R21, see I.R16 above). “Shadow-sensations” ––– this is Ryle’s term, intended to be pejorative, for what mental images consist of. Now, neither Hume nor anybody else goes wrong when he or she supposes ––– not that to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ is to have a “shadow-sensation”, but – –– that to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ essentially involves having “shadow-sensations”. Out of them, after all, the intentionality-bearing mental images are built. Thus, Ryle sometimes manages to deny the existence of mental images in a way that is fairly clear, but he never offers adequate support for his thesis that there are no “shadow-sensations” (and therefore no mental images), let alone for the even stronger thesis (implicitly asserted: see I.R21) that there could not be “shadow-sensations”. Adequate support for these negatives must be able to dislodge the very persuasive evidence from reflexive experience ––– which we all are capable of ––– that there are mental images (consisting of “shadow-sensations”), indeed, that everybody has mental images (sometimes rather engrossing ones, for example, when sexually day-dreaming). It is unlikely that this evidence, if treated fairly, can be dislodged. In contrast, it seems rather likely that Ryle’s denial of the existence of mental images is based purely on his prejudice against the inward mental life, a prejudice which he shares with Wittgenstein. The ultimate basis of this prejudice is the following false a priori idea: [I.R22] “[I]f there were such inner states and operations, one person would not be able to make probable inferences to their occurrence in the inner life of another” (CoM, 54) ––– an idea Ryle believes to be even provable (ibid.). (But its falsity is shown in Chapter II.) The undeniable existence of something is one thing, its adequate description quite another. Before we come to this, let us first look at what other Wittgensteinians have to say on the matter of imagining. It turns out to be essentially Rylean. I.2 Dennett (and Ryle) on imagining There is no inward mental life ––– this is what Dennett is quite explicitly asserting: 11

[I.D1] “What there is, really, is just various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain. […] Some of these contentfixations have further effects, which eventually lead to the utterance of sentences ––– in natural language ––– either public or merely internal. And so a heterophenomenological text gets created. When it’s interpreted, the benign illusion is created of there being an Author. This is sufficient to produce heterophenomenology. ––– But what about the actual phenomenology? ––– There is no such thing” (DE, 365).

[I.D2] “But there seems to be! ––– Exactly! There seems to be phenomenology. […] But it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology” (DE, 366). Thus, according to Dennett, “a heterophenomenological text” is a description by a nonexistent author ––– the subject, whose existence, according to Dennett, is a “benign illusion” ––– of what seems to that author to be his or her existing ––– in reality non-existent ––– inward mental, “phenomenological” life. As Dennett also puts it: [I.D3] “To sum up, subjects are unwitting creators of fiction, but to say that they are unwitting is to grant that what they say is, or can be, an account of exactly how it seems to them” (CE, 94). It is an obvious question, but a question not answered by Dennett, how what is non-existent according to Dennett ––– namely, the subject’s inward mental life and the subject ––– can seem to exist to what is non-existent according to Dennett: to the subject. It is another obvious question, a question not answered satisfactorily by Dennett, what could be the down-to-earth, the biological point of all this fiction-making (supposing it were the making of fiction). Could human organisms not do just as well without it, e.g., also without it have all the advantages that the use of language provides them with? Since there is no inward mental life, there are of course, according to Dennett, no mental images: [I.D4] “Are mental images real? There are real data structures in people’s brains that are rather like images ––– are they the mental images you’re asking about? If so, then yes; if not, then no” (CE, 459). To be precise: there are, according to Dennett, no mental images properly speaking, that is, no mental images in the phenomenological sense, which sense precludes their being identified with anything (physically) in the brain ––– a fact that Dennett, who is far from upholding a naïve identity-theory, is well aware of: [I.D5] “[T]he actual things we find in the brain to identify as the mental images will not have all the wonderful properties subjects have confidently endowed their images with” (CE, 94). 12

Since there are no mental images (properly speaking), there are no mental images appropriate for imagining,4 and hence there is no imagining (properly speaking). In essence, this is already Ryle’s and, at least in tendency, also Wittgenstein’s position. But Dennett’s psychological nihilism is far more outspoken than Ryle’s. Ryle would certainly not have said that imagining in the proper sense does not exist. On the contrary, he would have said that imagining in the proper sense does, of course, exist. What does not exist, according to Ryle, is merely the “activity” that so many people mistake for imagining, although the very idea of it is, according to Ryle, logically improper and absurd: an “activity” essentially involving the having of mental images. Ryle held that the traditional view of the mental ––– [I.R23] “the double-life theory” (CoM, 18), also known as [I.R24] “the official theory [or: doctrine]” (CoM, 11), or, famously, as [I.R25] “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine” (CoM, 15-16) ––– is, broadly speaking, a logical mistake, a consequence of misunderstanding the logic of mental-conduct concepts. Ryle thought of himself as being engaged in correcting that mistake. In the first chapter of The Concept of Mind, he writes: [I.R26] “In the succeeding chapters I try to prove that the official theory does rest on a batch of category-mistakes by showing that logically absurd corollaries follow from it. The exhibition of these absurdities will have the constructive effect of bringing out part of the correct logic of mentalconduct concepts” (CoM, 23). But, due to a very significant change in intellectual climate (during the 1950 and 1960), which finally promoted materialism from its former underdog status to the position of appearing to most Western intellectuals as the doctrine exclusively favoured by empirical science (note: a philosophical doctrine can hardly get more official than that), it came about that Ryle’s method of enlisting (or rather: of trying to enlist) the forces of logic (in a broad sense) against the traditional view of the mental has all but disappeared in Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. For Dennett, adherents of the traditional view do not misunderstand the 4

“Mental images appropriate for imagining”, that is: imaginal mental images, or mental images-in-fantasy. The modifier “imaginal”, or “-in-fantasy”, is not altogether unnecessary; for in a broad sense of the expression “mental image”, which Dennett, in fact, seems to have in mind, one can also call “mental images” the items that one takes to occur in perceiving (which, of course, is not imagining). In order to distinguish those items from mental images of the paradigmatic ––– the imaginal ––– kind, one could speak in their case of perceptual mental images (or, briefly, of perceptual images). Note that “mental image” is in this book, by and large, synonymous with “imaginal mental image” (or with “imaginal image”, in short), though sometimes also the broader sense of “mental image” comes into play and is crucial for the argument.

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logic of mental-conduct concepts. They are using, and not misusing, those concepts. But, “unfortunately”, in using those concepts quite properly in utterances meant to be understood literally, they are literally speaking about nothing, though it seems to them ––– very much so ––– to be quite otherwise: [I.D6] “But what is the text about in the unstrained [i.e., literal] sense? ––– Nothing. It’s fiction. It seems to be about various fictional characters, places, and events, but these events never happened; it isn’t really about anything” (CE, 366). Interestingly, this noiseless laying aside of the sword of logic that one witnesses in Dennett (though considering himself a Wittgensteinian, there is no significant effort on his part to do [I.W1]i “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PhI I, §109, 47e)) and the perfect nonchalance with which Dennett professes psychological nihilism (motto: who needs logic when science is on our side!) tend to strengthen a suspicion that one is likely to form about Ryle when reading The Concept of Mind: the suspicion that it was, after all, not an analytic interest in the true logic of the mental that motivated Ryle’s opposition to “the official doctrine”, but that a preconceived animosity against “the official doctrine” ––– as a piece of metaphysics ––– made him fabricate a logic of the mental as a weapon to be wielded by him against that doctrine (motto: if it is not obvious to you that science serves your metaphysical project, make logic serve it!). Ryle’s polemic, while certainly entertaining, tends to distract readers from what is really at issue. The same is true of Dennett’s polemic. Like Ryle, Dennett is fond of catchy, disparaging phrases, of ridiculing the position that he is attacking. For example, in the context of speaking about imagining in Consciousness Explained (but also in other places of that book), Dennett uses the stock epithet which, ever since the publication of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, has been increasingly employed by materialistically oriented authors to dismiss the traditional view of the mental with a mere flick of the wrist: “mind stuff”. [I.D7] “[W]hat is brown when you imagine a brown cow? Not the event in the brain that the scientists have calibrated with your [imaginal] experiencing-ofbrown. […] And since you did imagine a cow (you are not lying ––– the scientists even confirm that), an imagined cow came into existence at that time; something, somewhere must have had those properties at that time. The imagined cow must be rendered not in the medium of brain stuff, but in the medium of … mind stuff” (CE, 28).

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Mind stuff ––– Dennett rubs it in: [I.D8] “So we have discovered two sorts of things one might want to make out of mind stuff: the purple cow that isn’t in the brain, and the thing that does the thinking. But there are still other special powers we might want to attribute to mind stuff” (CE, 30). This is dripping with sarcasm, for Dennett, of course, has the same opinion about mind stuff that already Ryle had, who expressed it as follows: [I.R27] “Chemists once tried hard to find out the properties of phlogiston, but, as they never captured any phlogiston, they reconciled themselves to studying instead its influences and outward manifestations. They examined, in fact, the phenomena of combustion and soon abandoned the postulate of an uninspectable heat-stuff. […] Psychological research work will not have been wasted, if the postulate of a special mind-stuff goes the same way” (CoM, 322).

In this quotation from The Concept of Mind, we may well have before us the first occurrence of the English expression “mind stuff” (or “mindstuff”) in wholly polemical philosophical use.5 Using that expression ––– using it in a certain way ––– may well have the desired effect: to create in the minds of the readers a low opinion of the items which the author wishes them to have a low opinion of: the traditional view of the mind, the inward mental life. But what is the theoretical good in using that expression? What, in particular, is the philosophical relevance of doing so? Dennett believes that [I.D9] “[t]he idea of mind as distinct in this way from the 5 Already at the beginning of his book Ryle says that the human mind is supposed by “the double-life theory” to be [I.R27a] “made of a different sort of stuff” (CoM, 18). William James, in The Principles of Psychology. Volume One, has a whole chapter on mind-stuff: Chapter VI, titled “The Mind-Stuff Theory”. James’s use of the term is partly polemical (he also uses the expression “mind-dust”: ibid., 146), but not wholly so (though James is “troubled about […] the silliness of the mind-stuffists”: ibid., 162fn). The mind-stuff theory James discusses and rejects is “the theory that our mental states are compounds, expressed in its most radical form” (ibid., 145) ––– compounds of ever smaller states, until the level of mental atoms is reached. This theory is described by James to have a certain function in the evolutionary theory of consciousness, namely, to enable the assumption of a continuous evolution of consciousness: “If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. […] Each atom of the nebula, they [the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers, who disdain (what we now call) radical emergence] suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellowanimals” (ibid., 149).

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brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff, is dualism” (CE, 33; Dennett is echoing Ryle who speaks of [I.R28] “the dogma that minds are special-status things composed of a special stuff” (CoM, 205)). But in fact very few (psychophysical) dualists have believed in mind stuff; certainly Descartes, the arch dualist, did not believe in it (the res cogitans, though a substance, is not a stuff for Descartes). It is quite obvious that “the postulate of a special mind-stuff” is not necessary for dualism ––– the postulate that Ryle recommends psychologists abandon (see I.R27 above; but who are the psychologists who need to abandon it and who in doing so would be comparable to the chemists abandoning “the postulate of an uninspectable heat-stuff” centuries ago?). Holding that the mind, or at least some aspect of it, is not of a physical nature is quite sufficient for proposing dualism. No need for dualists to believe in mind stuff (and if they are in their right mind, they do not believe in it). Like his teacher Ryle, Dennett adheres to the motto If you cannot refute it, make it more refutable ––– a motto which is as reprehensible in the intellectual life as its libel-and-slander-counselling counterpart (If you cannot beat him, make him more beatable) is reprehensible in politics. “Mind stuff” is not the only term of disparagement that Dennett inherited from Ryle; the ancestry of his “Cartesian Theater” ––– [I.D10] “[S]omewhere, conveniently hidden in the obscure ‘center’ of the mind/brain, there is a Cartesian Theater, a place where ‘it all comes together’ and consciousness happens” (CE, 39) ––– can obviously be traced to Ryle’s [I.R29] “ghostly boards of the mental stage” (CoM, 64), “gallery in which […] pictures are ephemerally suspended” (see I.R13), [I.R30] “place [other] than the place in which […] verbal operations occur” (CoM, 330), [I.R31] “queer ‘places’, the occupants of which are special-status phantasms” (CoM, 40). Ryle even explicitly says that [I.R32a] “minds are nominated for their [the phantasms’, the visual images’, etc] theatres” (CoM, 245), but that [I.R32b] “we need erect no private theatres to provide stages for […] postulated extra objects” (CoM, 223) and that [I.R32c] “[w]e do not […] have to rig up one theatre, called the ‘outside world’, to house the common objects of anyone’s observation, and another, called ‘the mind’, to house the objects of some monopoly observations” (CoM, 207-208), [I.R32d] “a second theatre of special-status incidents” (CoM, 167). There is, it is true, a significant difference between Dennett’s and Ryle’s positions regarding mind-place. Ryle’s exclusive butt is the idea of the mind as a non-physical (“queer”) place, and that idea is Dennett’s butt, too. Dennett’s primary butt, however, is another idea: the idea of a (central) physical place for the mind ––– in 16

particular, for conscious experience ––– to be located in (see CE, 107). But what, really, is the philosophical relevance of all this insistent wittiness? The believer in an inward mental life ––– “the dualist” ––– needs neither a place nor a para-place for that life to take place. The very use of the word “inward” is strictly metaphorical. My inward mental life is metaphorically called “inward” because, speaking literally, it is subjective: it does not belong to the objective beings. Consequently, that life of mine does not belong to the objective beings to which my own body and all its parts and activities belong: to the physical beings, the “outward” beings. Hence that life of mine is, indeed, “inward” (though, of course, related in various important ways to “outward” beings). After having examined two of the more obvious rhetorical distractions Ryle and Dennett strew into the path of the reader in order to better achieve their argumentative goals, consider now a more subtle manner in which they mislead their readers, a manner that specifically concerns imagining. When speaking ––– as a philosopher of psychology ––– about imagining, one must distinguish between imagining an object and the object imagined; one must, for example, distinguish between imagining a brown (purple, yellow …) cow and the brown (purple, yellow, …) cow imagined. It is precisely the distinction between imagining an object and the object imagined that Dennett and Ryle blur if it serves their purposes. As for Ryle, we read (on the very first page of his chapter on imagining in The Concept of Mind): [I.R33] “[A]s I shall try to show, the familiar truth that people are constantly seeing things in their minds’ eyes and hearing things in their heads is no proof that there exist things which they see and hear, or that the people are seeing or hearing” (CoM, 245). If one takes Ryle at his words here, one can only wonder why, in the world, Ryle thinks that any rational person needs to be shown what Ryle says he will try to show. For no rational person believes that her imagining seeing or hearing X is a proof that X exists, or that she is seeing or hearing X when imagining to do so. Ryle continues: [I.R34] “Much as stage-murders do not have victims and are not murders, so seeing things in one’s mind’s eye does not involve either the existence of things seen or the occurrence of acts of seeing them” (CoM, 245). Very true ––– but which rational person believes otherwise? And the astonishment Ryle generates can still be increased: [I.R35] “[T]he question, ‘Where do the things and happenings exist which people imagine existing?’ is […] a spurious question. They do not exist anywhere” (CoM, 245). Well, of course they don’t. If somebody imagines certain things and happenings to exist which do not exist (as is often the 17

case ––– it is exclusively this kind of imagining that Ryle has in mind here), then they do not exist, and a fortiori they do not exist anywhere. It is so very true: [I.R36] “[N]o asylum is required for them to exist or occur in” (CoM, 245). But what is the rationale behind being told all this ––– to boot, with the weird suggestion that somebody is actually entertaining the idea that non-existent things and happenings exist somewhere? Here is an explanation of Ryle’s curious behaviour: The fact that he is uttering a series of truisms is very welcome to Ryle, for he regards those truisms as premises for establishing a conclusion which, he believes, is just as obvious as they are ––– if only matters are regarded rightly, with corrected intellectual vision, so to speak. He says: [I.R37] “What are spoken of as ‘visual images’, ‘mental pictures’, ‘auditory images’ and, in one use, ‘ideas’ are commonly taken to be entities which are genuinely found existing and found existing elsewhere than in the external world. So minds are nominated for their theatres. But …” (CoM, 245) ––– and then the text in quotation I.R33 immediately follows. The word “but” at the end of quotation I.R37 with the text in I.R33 immediately following ––– this fact of the text indicates that Ryle intends to deny the existence of visual images, auditory images, etc, in short: the existence of mental images, and intends what he says in I.R33 as a preliminary argument for this denial. But also what he says in I.R35 he intends as such an argument (the text of this latter quotation coming before the passages in I.R37 and I.R33, the passages in I.R34 and I.R36 following them ––– all on the first page of the CoMchapter on the imagination). What is appealed to in I.R33 and I.R35 is the undeniable truth that imagined objects often (though not always) do not exist. The message of I.R37 and its context, however, is that imaginings –– – if taken to essentially involve mental images ––– do not exist. But how is the non-existence of an imagining supposed to follow from the nonexistence of its object (assuming that its object is nonexistent)? ––– It does, of course, not follow, as every reader of, say, Joseph Conrad knows. The former non-existence does not follow from the latter ––– as little as the non-existence of a hallucination or of a dream follows from the nonexistence of their respective objects (and hallucinations and dreams essentially involve ––– indeed, more obviously than imaginings ––– mental images of the kind appropriate for them). The same blurring of the distinction between imagining an object and the object imagined, which “allows” Ryle to extend non-existence from the imagined object to the imagining of it (i.e., to its mental images), can also be found in Dennett. Clearly, Dennett is supposing in I.D7 and 18

I.D8 (see above) that the imagined cow does not exist, contrary to what, according to Dennett, “you” think. And therefore, according to Dennett, the imagining of the cow ––– if taken to render the cow “in the medium of mind stuff” (see I.D7), i.e., non-physically (as we can more reasonably say) ––– does not exist either, contrary to what, according to Dennett, “you” think. “You”, he suggests, on the contrary infer the existence of the imagining that renders the cow non-physically ––– “in the medium of mind stuff” ––– from the (supposed) existence of the imagined cow, in consideration of the fact that this allegedly existing cow is nowhere to be found in the brain or in the physical world (cf. I.R1 in the preceding section). But Dennett is committing a non sequitur here, one analogous to the non sequitur committed by Ryle. Dennett reports psychological experiments on the rotation of objects in the mind’s eye (see CE, 285-286), experiments which strongly suggest that the imagined rotation of an object has a certain speed. But how can this be? Dennett is exclusively interested in what must be going on in the subject’s brain if the existence of a (physical) “Cartesian Theater” is to be avoided (ibid.). But let us stick with the phenomenology of experience in imagination. Then, here is how the imagined rotation of an object can have a certain speed: The time taken by an imagined rotation ––– say, by a rotation in the mind that makes geometrical object X be recognized as having exactly the same shape, size, and spatial orientation as geometrical object Y ––– is identical to the time taken by the imagining of that rotation.6 The beginning and the end of the relevant time-interval are determined by two occurrences of mental imagery, each occurrence with a specific intentional content: one with the intentional content that X and Y are (in a way that hides congruence) out of alignment; the other with the intentional content that X and Y are in alignment (and obviously congruent). And while certain brain-events are rather likely to stand in a special nomological rela6 Bennett&Hacker, in their polemical discussion of the issue (see PFoNS, 197), overlook this identity, which straightforwardly implies that the (uniform) speed of an imagined (continuous) rotation is the (uniform) speed of the (continuous) imagining of that rotation. There is as little to balk at in this as there is in the fact that a film (i.e., a filmperformance) that shows (without slow motion or time-lapse and without interruption) a runner running 100 meters in 10 seconds (and nothing else) is 10 seconds long. Thus, continuously imagining a continuous rotation with uniform speed and covering 180° will take longer than (namely twice as long as) continuously imagining a continuous rotation with the same uniform speed and covering only 90°. It must, however, be admitted that certainly not everybody is “just like that” able to imagine a continuous rotation with a certain uniform speed.

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tionship to the said occurrences of mental imagery (which relationship secures that the latter are, among other things, simultaneous with the former), brain-events are certainly not the events that the imagining subject is reporting to occur at the beginning and at the end of her imagining the rotating of X. She would have none of Dennett’s ersatz mental images (cf. I.D4 and I.D5). Why should we? I.3 Bennett&Hacker on imagining Bennett&Hacker think it “[I.BH1] important to note, since it is all too often forgotten, that mental images are neither necessary nor sufficient for exercising the powers of the imagination” (PFoNS, 183). Perhaps it is not so much true that this is “all too often forgotten” than that people all too often have an opinion different from Bennett&Hacker’s. As in other matters of the “philosophical task” that these authors take upon themselves ––– of [I.BH2] “[i]nvestigating logical relations among [psychological] concepts” (PFoNS, 1) ––– so also regarding what is necessary or sufficient for imagining: people do not seem to follow Bennett&Hacker. The having of mental images is not sufficient for imagining ––– one can agree with this position of Bennett&Hacker’s if one has a broad conception of mental image: who is doing perception-in-recollection has mental images of a type rather similar to the (paradigmatic, central) type of mental image found in imagining; but he is still not imagining (not in the narrow ––– but paradigmatic ––– sense of imagining here intended, and also intended by Bennett&Hacker). But Bennett&Hacker also tell us that [I.BH3] “[o]ne can imagine, as Tolstoy did, the Battle of Borodino without conjuring up images ––– what was necessary was to conjure up descriptions of what it might have been like” (PFoNS, 183). The implicit biographical assertion that Tolstoy imagined the Battle of Borodino without having appropriate mental images is, very likely, false (though, perhaps, Tolstoy did indeed not conjure up those images: because he did not have to); just as is the implicit biographical assertion that Tolstoy described his imaginative version of the Battle of Borodino without having appropriate mental images: mental images against which he checked the accuracy of his descriptions, trying to fit words to what he imagined, and mental images which were also shaped by his descriptions (once these descriptions had emerged, and even in their very emergence). It is, moreover, false ––– not just very likely false ––– that for imagining the Battle of Borodino it is necessary “to conjure up de20

scriptions of what it might have been like”, as Bennett&Hacker allege. For imagining X (whether X is the Battle of Borodino or anything else) does not entail describing X (or a possible version of X). It does not even entail being able to describe what one is imagining; if it were otherwise, inarticulate persons would have to be denied imagination ––– which is absurd. Bennett&Hacker also believe that imagining is, in virtue of its concept, thinking of possibilities: [I.BH4] “The imagination is the faculty exercised in imagining. It is the capacity to think of possibilities” (PFoNS, 182). But it is not necessary for imagining X that X is thought to be possible, or even that X is thought about. It often happens that someone imagines X, but does not think about X. It also happens that someone imagines X, but does not think X to be possible (that is, has no opinion about the possibility of X, or, on the contrary, thinks X to be impossible). A fortiori it is neither necessary for imagining X that X is thought about and is possible, nor that X is thought to be possible and is (in fact) possible. More importantly, it is not sufficient for imagining X that X is thought to be possible and is possible. Not even this is a sufficient condition for imagining X, since there are many things which I think possible and which, presumably, are possible, which, however, I do not, and in fact cannot, imagine: for example, forms of life we cannot imagine. Bennett&Hacker advocate distinguishing between the faculty of the imagination (“the capacity to think of possibilities”: see I.BH4) and the faculty of fantasia, [I.BH5] “the capacity to conjure up [mental] images” (PFoNS, 183). [I.BH6] “For to be sure, one may have a remarkably lively capacity for calling up vivid visual and auditory images, for visualizing things and talking to oneself or rehearsing tunes to oneself ‘in the imagination’, without being an imaginative person at all” (PFoNS, 183-184). Benett & Hacker believe that [I.BH7] “the association between the cogitative (and creative) faculty of the imagination and the capacity to conjure up images is largely coincidental” (PFoNS, 183). But, as was already observed in Sect. I.1, the designation “imagining” for the mental activity discussed in this chapter is surely no accident: inward imagery ––– mental imagery ––– is, to repeat, essential for imagining. One can only marvel at the chutzpah with which Bennett&Hacker install their arbitrary decrees as conceptual laws ––– as part of the true logic of mental concepts ––– while they degrade an actually given conceptual connection ––– the connection between imagining and imaging ––– to the status of being a mere “association”, to boot, a “largely coincidental” one.

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However, more than half a century after the publication of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind ––– this systematic and, as a matter of fact, very successful attempt to persuade “theorists and laymen alike” (cf. I.R1) of the non-existence of the inward mental life ––– I applaud Bennett&Hacker for still not denying, on the contrary: positively supposing, that mental images exist. There are also two other respects in which Bennett&Hacker are correct about mental images: (I) [I.BH8] “[T]hey are not representations” (PFoNS, 193).7 (II) [I.BH9] “The sense in which one’s mental images are private is simply this: that one can have a mental image and not tell others that one has such an image or what it is an image of. If one does not tell anyone, then others will not know” (PFoNS, 187fn).

But Bennett&Hacker do not seem to be fully aware of what is implied by the existence of mental images, since, it turns out, they are not fully aware of what is implied by the two just-quoted truths about mental images. In the case of (I), less is implied than Bennett&Hacker think is implied; in the case of (II), more is implied than Bennett&Hacker think is implied. Let’s look at (I) and (II) in turn, starting with (II): Comment on (II): The having of mental images is, of course, particularly easy to keep to oneself; other experiences (the having of intense pain, for example) are not so easily kept in. Nevertheless, if “tell” is understood in an appropriately broad sense, then the Bennett&Hacker sense in which mental images are private can be said to be quite generally the sense in which any aspect of the inward mental life is private: one can have it and not tell others ––– that is, not express by linguistic or non-linguistic means, voluntarily or involuntarily, to others ––– that one has it; if one does not tell anyone, then others will not know. Fortunately, mental privacy in this sober sense is not as remote from the mindset of those who have a traditional view of the mental as Bennett&Hacker think it is. Mental privacy, in the sense just defined, has nothing to do with epistemological solipsism regarding the inward mental life (which life includes, as an important part, the having of mental images); it has nothing to do with the epistemological solipsism that is expressed by asserting: Only I 7

For people not significantly touched by Phenomenology, the following remark is rather remarkable: [I.BH8a] “A mental image is not determined as the image it is by convention, by similarity, or by representational intention. It is not a representation of what it is a mental image of at all” (PFoNS, 193).

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can know ––– and only I do know (at least a part of) ––– what I experience in the course of time. This kind of epistemological solipsism is considered by Wittgenstein and Ryle to be essential to the traditional view of the mental, to belief in the inward mental life; it receives much of their criticism, and can certainly be said to be the main prop of their animus against the traditional view of the mental. Bennett&Hacker, writing more than fifty years after Wittgenstein’s and Ryle’s attacks on the traditional view of the mental, still find it necessary to argue against epistemological solipsism regarding the inward mental life: [I.BH10] “There is, we argued, nothing intrinsically private about experience. It is true that I may not disclose what I experience […]. But that does not make these experiences intrinsically private” (PFoNS, 295). Very true. And, in fact, it is not necessary ––– except perhaps occasionally, for therapeutic purposes ––– to argue against the intrinsic privacy of experience; for nobody ––– who is not confused –– – really believes in the intrinsic privacy of experience. If we have adequate means of expression, we can adequately express ––– even describe ––– anything. What we experience is no exception to this. Of course we can tell ––– express by linguistic or non-linguistic means, voluntarily or involuntarily ––– what is going on mentally inside of us, and having told others, others will know about it. It is true that our means of expression are not always adequate for expressing our experiences. But just as we constantly strive to improve our means of expression in other areas of the search for knowledge (in fact, this is a large part of the scientific enterprise), so we can certainly strive to improve the means of expression for our experiences, especially, of course, the voluntary linguistic ––– and here especially the descriptive ––– means for expressing them. It is worth noting that Husserl ––– an exponent of the traditional view of the mental, a firm (and very sophisticated) believer in the inward mental life ––– did not maintain epistemological solipsism regarding the inward mental life. Of course he did not; for if he had done so, Phenomenology ––– as envisioned by Husserl: Phenomenology as an intersubjective enterprise for the acquisition of knowledge about (the essence of) the inward mental life ––– would have had to be considered impossible by Husserl. Nor did Husserl consider epistemological solipsism regarding the inward mental life to be a danger for his views. Though Husserl believed in the inward mental life, he also believed (as must be obvious to anyone familiar with his writings) that epistemological solipsism regarding that life is just false. This might have given pause to Bennett&Hacker ––– philosophical authors who, just like Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Dennett, are only 23

too ready to ascribe any amount of misconception, confusion, and absurdity to anyone who adheres to the traditional view of the mental. (But on the 461 pages of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience Husserl is mentioned not even once.) I do not hesitate to assert that Husserl (and Kant, and Descartes) would have subscribed to the sober Bennett&Hacker definition of mental privacy without hesitation. But Bennett&Hacker do want the adherents of the traditional view to be absurd, and in their eagerness for the absurdity of the (partly imaginary) enemy, they themselves fall prey to absurdity. Consider: [I.BH11] “There is nothing ‘inner’ or unobservable about the manifest emotions of others ––– they are exhibited to public view. All that is true is, first, that when we observe the anger or fear of another, we do not usually feel anger or fear ourselves; second, sometimes a person may feel angry or frightened and not show it” (PFoNS, 90).

But this, in fact, is not “all that is true”, not even for Bennett&Hacker. Bennett&Hacker would surely not balk at the proposal that it also true that sometimes a person ––– not only may, but ––– does feel angry or frightened and does not show it. Bennett&Hacker would surely not wish to disbelieve what everybody knows to be true. If we proceed on the assumption that Bennett&Hacker really intend to assert the “does”-proposition, and not merely the “may”-proposition, but assert the latter as an understatement for the former; then part of what Bennett&Hacker in effect assert in I.BH11 is this: (A) A manifest emotion of a person is always entirely public, that is, there is nothing about it that is unobservable to others. (B) Sometimes an emotion of a person (her feeling angry or frightened) is not shown by the person. While assertion (B) is manifestly true, assertion (A) is manifestly false. For no matter which manifest emotion we are looking at, it is not entirely public: to every manifest emotion there is something which is experienced but not shown, not told (in the appropriate, broad sense of “tell”), and which, therefore, is unobservable to others (as Bennett&Hacker themselves have put it ––– see I.BH9 –––: “If one does not tell anyone, then others will not know”). As a consequence of the ordinary logic of emotionconcepts, we never ever presume that a manifest emotion ––– manifest anger, manifest fright, manifest grief, manifest joy ––– is completely manifest: that there is nothing to it that is not on public display, not observable

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by others;8 rather, we always assume that there is necessarily more to it than is observable, that there is, in other words, more to it than is expressed. If it were true that there is nothing more to a manifest emotion than is expressed, then a perfect expression of the emotion (as could be rendered by a perfect actor) would logically require the presence of the emotion. But there is no such logical connection. Note, moreover, that assertion (A) does not go well with assertion (B): Why should an emotion be sometimes entirely non-public, as (B) asserts, but invariantly turn out to be entirely public as soon as it becomes manifest, as is asserted by (A)? Here we have a gap that is not bridged, and which, in fact, seems unbridgeable. (But wait! There is a way to understand assertion (A) in which it is at least as true as assertion (B): simply let “manifest” in (A) mean as much as “entirely public”! ––– Yes, indeed; but presumably Bennett&Hacker did not mean to assert a mere triviality with assertion (A).) Of all parts of the inward mental life, it is especially true of imaginings that “if one does not tell anyone, then others will not know” (cf. I.BH9). The modern methods of brain-scanning ––– even if they were not in their current primitive state ––– do not, and would not, refute this assertion. As everyone knows, imaginings (often generated by reading, or listening to, imaginative texts) may get so vivid as to have effects on nonlinguistic behaviour; the imaginings, so to speak, emerge: in frightbehaviour, in sexual arousal, in play-acting, etc. But these behavioural reactions transport only a very small amount of information about the imaginings themselves. Linguistic reports on imaginings, made by the subject who has (or had) the imaginings, is the primary and the only truly informative source for obtaining public knowledge about imaginings. Only such reports allow correlating what is going on in the subject’s brain (which, under the right circumstances, is accessible to public scrutiny) with what the subject is experiencing in imagination; without such reports, brainscanning would tell us just about nothing about a subject’s imaginings. Bennett&Hacker quite obviously believe that the privacy of the mental in the sense of “if one does not tell anyone, then others will not know” is, philosophically speaking, harmless ––– that if one grants the existence of such privacy, one will not disgruntle the ghosts of Wittgenstein and Ryle. But, surprisingly (or not), such privacy turns out to be all the privacy of the 8 The word “manifest” in this context is not intended by Bennett&Hacker to be the antonym of “dispositional”. Rather, they use it in the sense of “exhibited to public view” (cf. I.BH11).

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mental that the traditional view ––– maintaining the existence and the fullness of the inward mental life ––– requires, and it turns out to be quite a lot of privacy. Indeed, it seems to me (and, in reason, ought to have seemed to Bennett&Hacker) to be more of privacy of the mental than is acceptable to non-heretical Wittgensteinians. (End of the comment on (II).) Comment on (I): Mental images are not representations, Bennett&Hacker tell us (see I.BH8). If they had just meant by this that mental images do not representationally refer (or attempt, or pretend, to representationally refer) to objects, but present objects themselves (though the mental images in imaginings do this in a way that is different from the way it is also done by mental images in perceptions),9 Bennett&Hacker would have been entirely right. But, as things are, they meant more than that, and hence their assertion is correct only in the sense that it can be correctly interpreted, that is: interpreted without the Bennett&Hacker excess. This is the excess: [I.BH12] “[M]ental images, like thoughts, are all message and no medium” (PFoNS, 193). Even though one can, in a sense, speak of mental images, thoughts, sensations, etc as messages (my mental images, my thoughts, my sensations, etc are, in a sense, addressed to me ––– their subject ––– and therefore they are, in a manner of speaking, messages for me), the Bennett&Hacker assertion still remains absurd: because it is patently impossible that there be a message without a medium in which it is expressed. But am I not making too much of I.BH12? It seems not. For what Bennett&Hacker mean to assert by the more or less metaphorical statement in I.BH12, they state in a more literal fashion a few lines further down: [I.BH13] “[M]ental images [and Bennett&Hacker should have added: thoughts] have no non-representational properties” (PFoNS, 193), from which they conclude that mental images are not representations (see I.BH8) since [I.BH14] “[a]nything that can be said to be a representation of something has both representational and non-representational properties” (PFoNS, 192). The conclusion they reach is reached logically correctly, and it is true (if correctly interpreted); their first premise (stated in I.BH14) is true, too; but their second premise (stated in I.BH13) is false; for at least some mental images (and thoughts) do have representational properties. 9

One can speak of mental images in perceptions if one takes the expression “mental images” in a broad sense: so that it does not merely refer to the mental images in imaginings (cf. footnote 4).

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Before showing this, it may be helpful to point out that the designations “representational property of X” (X being some entity or other) and “non-representational property of X” are rather misleading, in consideration of what Bennett&Hacker actually have in mind when employing them (see PFoNS, 192-193). When using the designation “representational property of X”, they have in mind a property which is a property of some object referred to by X, but which is not a property of X itself (for example: one of the objects referred to by the representation of a certain shooting is a shooting gunman, that is: has the property of being a gunman, but the representation itself is not a gunman, does not have that property). When using the designation “non-representational property of X”, on the other hand, Bennett&Hacker have in mind a property which is a property of X itself, but which is not a property of any object referred to by X (for example: the representation of a certain shooting is a schematic drawing, that is: has the property of being a schematic drawing, but every object referred to by that representation ––– the gunman, the pistol, the person getting shot, etc ––– is not a schematic drawing, does not have that property). Thus it is an invitation to confusion to speak, as Bennett&Hacker do, of [I.BH15] “[r]epresentational properties of paintings” (PFoNS, 192); for there are, in the sense they accord to this phrase, no representational properties of paintings: paintings do not have such properties, only the [I.BH16] “the objects in the paintings (i.e. […] the painted trees, the painted house and the painted figures)” (PFoNS, 192) have them. Now, the fact that some mental images have what Bennett&Hacker, not very appropriately, call non-representational properties can be easily demonstrated. One can even plausibly argue that every mental image has non-representational properties: Firstly, all mental images (and all thoughts) are subjective episodes.10 Secondly, all subjective episodes have non-representational properties. Therefore, thirdly, all mental images have non-representational properties. The second premise ––– the only premise of the preceding argument that stands in need of demonstration ––– is rather plausibly shown to be true in the following way: Let X be a subjective episode. The property of 10

One can call them “experiences”, if one gives the term “experience” the very general sense that the German noun “Erlebnis” has in, e.g., Husserl’s writings. Husserl’s slightly technical sense of “Erlebnis” requires only a small extension of the wide applicability that the term has already on the basis of its ordinary meaning (for example, one can ––– even in ordinary, non-philosophical German ––– speak of a “Denkerlebnis” ––– “thinking-experience”).

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subjectively intending all objects of X (of having each object of X as intentional object) is a property of X, but it is not a property of any object of X (otherwise some object of X would be subjectively intending itself ––– which is impossible). Thus the property of subjectively intending all objects of X is a non-representational property of X. Another such property is the property of being different from every object of X (which, obviously, is not a property of any object of X, but which is a property of X itself because no subjective episode is its own object). The above general argument is highly plausible ––– though, indeed, it is no departure from reason to have doubts about its ultimate suppositions (indicated by the italicizations in the preceding paragraph; the matter comes up again in Sect. II.2.1, in the next chapter, in the discussion of a quotation from Searle, and in footnote 26 of that chapter). Admittedly, too, the two properties of subjective episodes that have just seen to be, relative to each case, non-representational properties of them, are rather “abstract”; this had to be so because the considerations in the general argument needed to be entirely general. But it is safe to assume that for most subjective episodes, and certainly for most mental images, it is possible to point out properties of them which are not properties of their respective objects and which are considerably less “abstract” than the two properties already plausibly shown to be available as non-representational properties of them. For example, often a subjective episode is distinguished from all its objects by the property of having the intrinsic temporal location / (where / is the temporal location which in fact is the subjective episode’s intrinsic temporal location); for often the objects of a subjective episode do not have the same intrinsic temporal location as that episode, and often they do not have any intrinsic temporal location. For example, the objects of all abstract thoughts and of many mental images do not have any intrinsic temporal location ––– whereas, of course, every subjective episode (hence every abstract thought and every mental image) has an intrinsic temporal location (since it is individuated ––– not only, but also ––– by the particular timestretch filled by it). Thus, the Bennett&Hacker assertion that (all) mental images have no non-representational properties (see I.BH13) is as false as the more colourful Bennett&Hacker assertion that (all) mental images are all message and no medium (see I.BH12). But this fact does not take away the truth of the further Bennett&Hacker assertion that mental images are not representations (see I.BH8); it merely shows that this truth does not have the content that Bennett&Hacker think it has. (End of the comment on (I).) 28

However, surrounding that truth, Bennett&Hacker turn out to have further misconceptions about imaginings and mental images. If mental images are not representations, which is true, it is of course also true that a [I.BH17] “sketch [of what somebody imagined and how he imagined it] is not an ‘outer picture’ of an ‘inner picture’ ” (PFoNS, 193); for a mental image is not a representation, hence not a picture, hence ––– a fortiori ––– not an inner picture. But truth and falsehood are rather close together in Bennett&Hacker’s views on imagining. This should already be evident, but it can be made more evident still: [I.BH18] “What makes his sketch a good representation of what he imagined and how he imagined it is not a resemblance between the sketch and the mental image. […] Rather, what makes the sketch a good representation is his sincere assertion that this is what he had in mind, this is how he imagined it. This avowal does not rest upon an ‘inner glance’ at his mental image” (PFoNS, 193).

What, then, does it rest on, one wonders? (Bennett&Hacker do not tell.) But all of these assertions are, indeed, false (despite the sincerity ––– even cocksureness ––– with which they are made): First, that a sketch is a good representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined is certainly not made true by the imaginer’s sincere avowal that it is a good representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined. It may not be true that it is a good representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined, although it is sincerely avowed by the imaginer to be such a representation; and it may be true that it is a good representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined, although it is sincerely avowed by the imaginer not to be such a representation. There may not be any avowals at all regarding the quality of the sketch as a representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined ––– and yet it will be either true or false that the sketch is a good representation of it. What, then, makes it either true or false that the sketch is a good representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined? The true answer to this question is provided in what follows below. Second, what makes the sketch a good representation of what was imagined and how it was imagined is ––– in fact ––– a resemblance, a fairly strong one, between the sketch and the corresponding mental image in the imagining. But, lest I appear to have made a grotesquely false claim (especially from a dualistic perspective, but also from a physicalistic one), I hasten to add: the resemblance between the sketch and the mental image is an indirect resemblance and a merely analogical one. The direct and lit29

eral resemblance (in virtue of which, and in virtue of the strength of which, the sketch ––– the representing entity ––– can be analogically said to resemble the mental image ––– the represented entity ––– and to resemble it strongly) is the resemblance between the mental image ––– the imaginal image ––– and the perceptual image evoked by the sketch in accordance with a particular perceptual reading of it (a reading likely to be guided by certain representational conventions). It should be noted that just as the imaginal image is not a representation, so also the perceptual image is not a representation, and therefore, of course, the perceptual image does not represent the imaginal image; the former merely resembles the latter (and vice versa). Third, a resemblance, literally speaking, between X and Y and the strength of that resemblance is ascertained by a comparison of X with Y, of Y with X. Now, how might one compare a perceptual image X with a mental image Y that occurs in an imagining? There is no insurmountable obstacle to doing just this; for some people ––– artists ––– do it every day of their professional life, and when a man meets his ideal woman, or a woman her ideal man, he/she is doing just this. Both X and Y are mental images in the broad sense (only Y is a mental image in the narrow sense); both X and Y are, therefore, of one kind and, therefore, comparable. The best candidate for the position of comparison-maker –––– though far from being infallible in the judgments based on the comparison ––– is certainly the person who has both mental images. But merely having both mental images is not enough; it is necessary to adopt the reflexive stance with respect to both of them: only in this way can they be compared. Adopting the reflexive stance in a certain way is precisely the taking of the inner glance (certainly not with one’s eyes) which Bennett&Hacker mention in a negative way in I.BH18, putting the expression ––– as is to be expected of good Wittgensteinians ––– in scare-quotes. For Bennett&Hacker think that [I.BH19] “[i]ntrospection […] is a form of reflexive thought, not a form of perception” (PFoNS, 91). One can make two assertions out of this: introspection is a form of reflexive thought; introspection is not a form of perception. The first assertion is false, because one often introspects (takes the “inner glance”) without thinking or even paying attention,11 as, for example, when one realizes en passant that one is in pain. This is not in any way an activity of thinking: concepts play no role in it; nor is it a matter of attention: for the realization comes while one is occupied, and continues to be occupied, with some11

[I.BH19a] “In another sense, introspection is a matter of attention” (PFoNS, 91).

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thing else. The second assertion is true in a sense, for introspection is not done with any of the senses.12 But ––– and this should have given pause to Bennett&Hacker ––– all believers in a perception-theory of introspection (Husserl being one of them) are entirely aware of this (utterly trivial) fact: that introspection is not done with any of the senses ––– and still they stick to a perception-theory of introspection. For Bennett&Hacker, this can only be a very special condition: a dysfunction of the intelligence only to be found in the rather intelligent, and yet a dysfunction of the intelligence comparable to the quite normal lack of intelligence that we find in flies. Bennett&Hacker are suspiciously quick to diagnose this condition ––– of being [I.BH20] “caught in the trammels of language, enmeshed in the web of grammar” (PFoNS, 198) ––– in others; they are doing so, of course, in the wake of Wittgenstein, who considered his aim in philosophy to be this: [I.W2]ii “[t]o show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PhI I, §309, 103e; “show” replaces “shew”). But is there not such a thing as reflexive perception (which, ipso facto, is not sense-perception)? Husserl, in any case, declares: [I.H1]iii “The manner of being of the experience [des Erlebnisses] is this: to be in principle perceivable in the manner of reflexion” (Id1, §45, 95). This seems certainly more plausible to me than Bennett&Hacker’s dogmatizing: [I.BH21] “I do not perceive my pain (there is no such thing as perceiving one’s own pain) ––– I have it” (PFoNS, 91), [I.BH22] “I do not perceive my thinkings, realizings and dwellings” (PFoNS, 92).13 For it is evident to me that I obtain knowledge of my pains, thinkings, realizings, and dwellings (and of my having them) in a very direct manner, certainly not by inference: I am in immediate contact with the actually present thing itself, e.g., the pain (qua my pain), the thinking (qua my thinking), etc. May not any noninferential manner of cognition in which the cognizer is cognizing the object as being itself actually present be reasonable and rightfully called “perception”? Precisely such a manner of cognition is what Husserl did call “perception” (“Wahrnehmung”): [I.H2]iv “In perception, the object is 12 But note that the well-functioning of this or that sense is, of course, necessary for certain introspections. For example: the blind man cannot introspect, i.e., introspectively consider, his seeing the horizon (because he cannot see the horizon). 13 I wonder why Bennett&Hacker put “perceive” in italics in the last two quotations. Do they wish to say that I do not perceive my pains, my thinkings, realizings and dwellings with my senses; that one does not sense-perceive such goings-on? If so, Bennett&Hacker would be saying something true, but also something totally uninteresting.

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standing there bodily [steht als leibhafter da],14 it is standing there, still more precisely speaking, as actually present, as itself given in the actual presence” (DuR, §4, 14), in other words: perception is [I.H3]v “the consciousness whose essential character it is to be consciousness of the actual presence of the object” (DuR, §8, 22).15 And in this characterization of perception, Husserl did not only have in mind the perception of so-called external objects (that can actually “stand there”, non-metaphorically speaking): [I.H4]vi “Let us first consider the case of an actually present [aktuelles] experience [Erlebnis] at which we are looking. We take it as it ‘is in itself’ […] The experience, the absolute datum is standing there bodily [steht leibhaft da]; it is, note, not just imagined, in simile [im Gleichnis] thought, or symbolically and conceptually thought (least of all the latter); rather, it is as itself and as actually now [aktuell jetzt] given before our eyes.16 We notice: the so-called ‘looking at’ an experience, performed in the described attitude [the attitude of taking the experience as it ‘is in itself’], has […] the same basic character as thing-perception has, with which we have been dealing so far; this basic character, therefore, can determine a wider concept of perception, a concept that does not bind itself to thinghood. Accordingly, a thing-perception, even though not itself instantiating thinghood, is the object of another ‘perception’, namely, of that [just14

“The object (standing there) bodily” entails for Husserl two things (though he does not seem to have always been aware of the fact that they are two; see the discussion of I.H11 and I.H12 in Sect. I.4): (1) the object (standing there) as itself, not in any sense in effigy; (2) the object (standing there) as actually present (which, in Husserl’s idiom, is merely a different formulation for bodily). Husserl’s work on imagining finally led him to the recognition that in imagining (not in perceiving) one has the consciousness of (1) without the consciousness of (2), and therefore also the consciousness of (1) without the consciousness of the object (standing there) bodily. (Concerning these matters, see Sect. I.4.) 15 From this Husserlian characterization of perception one may be tempted to conclude that perceiving entails for Husserl ––– as for most people ––– the actual presence (simpliciter, not merely in experience) and hence the existence (simpliciter, not merely as an intentional object) of what is being perceived. But it does not generally follow from the consciousness of the actual presence of X that X is actually present or (at least) exists, of which fact Husserl was well aware. Perceiving, therefore, does not generally entail for Husserl either the actual presence or the existence of what is being perceived, and to this extent he has a concept of perception that significantly diverges from (what has come to be) the normal one. For Husserl, also illusionary perceptions exist; such experiences are for him quite properly called perceptions (see DuR, §4, 15; for more on perception and existence, see Sect. IV.3). 16 Regarding “as itself and as actually now given before our eyes”, consider footnote 14.

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mentioned] looking-at, of that reflexion, as one also says since the time of Locke, and likewise every other experience if it is looked at” (DuR, §8, 21-22).

For that other type of perception besides thing-perception ––– i.e., besides the perception of external objects (the latter being certainly the type of perception that comes to mind first) ––– Husserl has the designation [I.H5] “experience-perception [Erlebniswahrnehmung]” (DuR, §8, 22). In a lecture of 1925, he calls it [I.H6]vii “inner perception as perception of the purely subjective” ()