The Life of the Mind
Page 5
5. Appearance and semblance
Since choice as the decisive factor in self-presentation has to do with appearances, and since appearance has the double function of concealing some interior and revealing some "surface"—for instance of concealing fear and revealing courage, that is, hiding the fear by showing courage—there is always the possibility that what appears may by disappearing turn out finally to be a mere semblance. Because of the gap between inside and outside, between the ground of appearance and appearance—or to put it differently, no matter how different and individualized we appear and how deliberately we have chosen this individuality—it always remains true that "inside we are all alike," unchangeable except at the cost of the very functioning of our inner psychic and bodily organs or, conversely, of an intervention undertaken to remove some dysfunction. Hence, there is always an element of semblance in all appearance: the ground itself does not appear. From this it does not follow that all appearances are mere semblances. Semblances are possible only in the midst of appearances; they presuppose appearance as error presupposes truth. Error is the price we pay for truth, and semblance is the price we pay for the wonders of appearance. Error and semblance are closely connected phenomena; they correspond with each other.
Semblance is inherent in a world ruled by the twofold law of appearing to a plurality of sensitive creatures each equipped with the faculties of perception. Nothing that appears manifests itself to a single viewer capable of perceiving it under all its inherent aspects. The world appears in the mode of it-seems-to-me, depending on particular perspectives determined by location in the world as well as by particular organs of perception. This mode not only produces error, which I can correct by changing my location, drawing closer to what appears, or by improving my organs of perception with the help of tools and implements, or by using my imagination to take other perspectives into account; it also gives birth to true semblances, that is, to deceptive appearance, which I cannot correct like an error since they are caused by my permanent location on die earth and remain bound up with my own existence as one of the earth's appearances. "Semblance" (dokos, from dokei moi), said Xenophanes, "is wrought over all things," so that "there is no man, nor will there ever be one who knows clearly about the gods and about everything I speak of; for even if someone should chance to say what appears in its total reality, he himself would not know it"33
Following Portmann's distinction between authentic and inauthentic appearances, one would like to speak of authentic and inauthentic semblances: the latter, mirages like some Fata Morgana, will dissolve of their own accord or can be dispelled upon closer inspection; the former, on the contrary, like the movement of the sun, its rise in the morning and setting in the evening, will not yield to any amount of scientific information, because that is the way the appearance of sun and earth inevitably seems to an earth-bound creature that cannot change its abode. Here we are dealing with those "natural and unavoidable illusions" of our sense apparatus to which Kant referred in his introduction to the transcendental dialectic of reason. The illusion in transcendent judgment he called "natural and unavoidable," because it was "inseparable from human reason, and ... even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction."34
That natural and inevitable semblances are inherent in a world of appearances from which we can never escape is perhaps the strongest, certainly the most plausible, argument against the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts, the everyday reality given to our senses. All living creatures, capable both of receiving appearance through sense organs and displaying themselves as appearances, are subject to authentic illusions, which are by no means the same for each species but connected with the form and mode of their specific life process. Animals are also able to produce semblances—quite a number of them can even counterfeit a physical appearance—and men and animals both possess an innate ability to manipulate appearance for the sake of deception. To uncover the "true" identity of an animal behind its adaptive temporary color is not unlike the unmasking of the hypocrite. But what then appears under a deceptive surface is not an inside self, an authentic appearance, changeless and reliable in its thereness. The uncovering destroys a deception; it does not discover anything authentically appearing. An "inside self," if it exists at all, never appears to either the inner or the outward sense, since none of the inner data possess stable, relatively permanent features which, being recognizable and identifiable, characterize individual appearance. "No fixed and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances," as Kant observed repeatedly.35 Actually it is misleading to speak even of inner "appearances"; all we know are inner sensations whose relentless succession prevents any of them from assuming a lasting, identifiable shape. ("For where, when, and how has there ever been a vision of the inside?...The 'psychism' is opaque to itself."36 ) Emotions and "inner sensations" are "unworldly" in that they lack the chief worldly property of "standing still and remaining" at least long enough to be clearly perceived—and not merely sensed—to be intuited, identified, and acknowledged; again according to Kant, "time, the only form of inner intuition, has nothing permanent."37 In other words, when Kant speaks of time as the "form of inner intuition," he speaks, though without being aware of it, metaphorically, and he draws his metaphor from our spatial experiences, which have to do with outside appearances. It is precisely the absence of form and hence of any possibility of intuition that characterizes our experience of inner sensations. In inner experience, the only thing to hold onto, to distinguish something at least resembling reality from the incessantly passing moods of our psyche, is persistent repetition. In extreme cases repetition can become so persistent that it results in the unbroken permanence of one mood, one sensation; but this invariably indicates a grave disorder of the psyche, the euphoria of the maniac or the depression of the melancholic.
6. The thinking ego and the self: Kant
In the work of no other philosopher has the concept of appearance, and hence of semblance (of Erscheinung and Schein), played so decisive and central a role as in Kant. His notion of a "thing in itself," something which is but does not appear although it causes appearances, can be, and has been, explained on the grounds of the theological tradition: God is "something"; He is "not nothing." God can be thought, but only as that which does not appear, is not given to our experience, hence is "in itself," and, as He does not appear, He is not for us. This interpretation has its difficulties. For Kant, God is an "Idea of reason" and as such for us: to think God and speculate about a hereafter is, according to Kant, inherent in human thought insofar as reason, man's speculative capacity, necessarily transcends the cognitive faculties of his intellect: only what appears and, in the mode of it-seems-to-me, is given to experience can be known; but thoughts also "are," and certain thought-things, which Kant calls "ideas," though never given to experience and therefore unknowable, such as God, freedom, and immortality, are for us in the emphatic sense that reason cannot help thinking them and that they are of the greatest interest to men and the life of the mind. It may therefore be advisable to examine to what extent the notion of a non-appearing "thing in itself" is given in the very understanding of the world as a world of appearances, regardless of the needs and assumptions of a thinking being and of the life of the mind.
There is first the everyday fact—rather than Kant's conclusion mentioned above ([>])—that every living thing because it appears possesses a "ground which is not appearance" but which can be forced to the light of day and then becomes what Portmann called an "inauthentic appearance." To be sure, in Kant's understanding, things that do not appear of their own accord but whose existence can be demonstrated—inner organs, roots of trees and plants, and the like—are also appearances. Still, his conclusion that appearances "must themsel
ves have grounds which are not appearances" and therefore must "rest upon a transcendent object38 which determines them as mere representations,"39 that is, upon something which in principle is of an altogether different ontological order, seems clearly drawn in analogy to phenomena of this world, which contains both authentic and inauthentic appearances, and in which the inauthentic appearances, insofar as they contain the very apparatus of the life process, seem to cause the authentic ones. The theological bias (in Kant's case the need to make the arguments favor the existence of an intelligible world) enters here in the word "mere representations'—as though he had forgotten his own central thesis: "We assert that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience, and that for this reason they have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgment."40 The plausibility of Kant's argument, that what causes something to appear must be of a different order from the appearance itself, rests on our experience with these life phenomena, but the hierarchical order between the "transcendent object" (the thing in itself) and "mere representations" does not, and it is this order of priorities that Portmann's thesis reverses. Kant was carried away by his great desire to shore up each and every argument which, without being able to arrive at a definite proof, may at least make it overwhelmingly plausible that "there undoubtedly is something distinct from the world which contains the ground of the order of the world,"41 and therefore is itself of a higher order. If we trust only our experiences with appearing and non-appearing things and start speculating on the same lines, we can just as well, actually with much stronger plausibility, conclude that there may indeed exist a fundamental ground behind an appearing world, but that this ground's chief and even sole significance lies in its effects, that is, in what it causes to appear, rather than in its sheer creativity. If the divine is what causes appearances and does not appear itself, then man's inner organs could turn out to be his true divinities.
In other words, the common philosophical understanding of Being as the ground of Appearance is true to the phenomenon of Life, but the same cannot be said of the evaluation of Being versus Appearance which is at the bottom of all two-world theories. That traditional hierarchy arises not from our ordinary experiences with the world of appearances, but, rather, from the not-at-all ordinary experience of the thinking ego. As we shall see later, the experience transcends not only Appearance but Being as well. Kant himself explicitly identifies the phenomenon that gave him the actual basis for his belief in a "thing in itself' behind "mere" appearances. It was the fact that "in the consciousness of myself in the sheer thinking activity [beim blossen Denken], I am the thing itself [das Wesen selbst, i.e. das Ding an sich] although nothing of myself is thereby given for thought."42 If I reflect on the relation of me to myself obtaining in the thinking activity, it may well seem as though my thoughts were "mere representations" or manifestations of an ego that itself remains forever concealed, for thoughts of course are never anything like properties that can be predicated of a self or a person. The thinking ego is indeed Kant's "thing in itself": it does not appear to others and, unlike the self of self-awareness, it does not appear to itself, and yet it is "not nothing."
The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story. Etienne Gilson, asked to write his autobiography, responded: "A man of seventy-five should have many things to say about his past, but ... if he has lived only as a philosopher, he immediately realizes that he has no past."43 For the thinking ego is not the self. There is an incidental remark—one of those on which we are so dependent in our inquiry—in Thomas Aquinas that sounds rather mysterious unless we are aware of this distinction between the thinking ego and the self: "My soul [in Thomas the organ for thought] is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man."44
The inner sense that might let us get hold of the thinking activity in some sort of inner intuition has nothing to hold on to, according to Kant, because its manifestations are utterly unlike "the appearance confronting external sense [which finds] something still and remaining ... while time, the only form of inner intuition, has nothing permanent."45 Hence, "I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thought, not an intuition." And he adds in a footnote: "The 'I think' expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given thereby, but the mode in which I am ... is not thereby given."46 Kant stresses the point repeatedly in the Critique of Pure Reason— nothing permanent "is given in inner intuition insofar as I think myself"47 —but we will do better to turn to his pre-critical writings to find an actual description of the sheer experiences of the thinking ego.
In the Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766), Kant stresses the "immateriality" of the mundus intelligibilis, the world in which the thinking ego moves, in contrast to the "inertia and constancy" of dead matter that surrounds living beings in the world of appearances. In this context, he distinguishes between the "notion the soul of man has of itself as mind [Geist] through an immaterial intuition, and the consciousness through which it presents itself as a man by means of an image having its source in the sensation of physical organs and conceived in relation to material things. It is, therefore, indeed always the same subject that is both a member of the visible and the invisible world, but not the same person, since ... what I as mind think is not remembered by me as man, and, conversely, my actual state as man does not enter my notion of myself as mind." And he speaks in a strange footnote of a "certain double personality which belongs to the soul even in this life"; he compares the state of the thinking ego to the state of sound sleep "when the external senses are completely at rest." The ideas in sleep, he suspects, "may be clearer and broader than the very clearest in the waking state," precisely because "man, at such times, is not sensible of his body." And of these ideas, on waking up, we remember nothing. Dreams are something still different; they "do not belong here. For then man does not wholly sleep ... and weaves the actions of his mind into the impressions of the external senses."48
These notions of Kant's, if understood as constituting a dream theory, are patently absurd. But they are interesting as a rather awkward attempt to account for the mind's experiences of withdrawal from the real world. Because an account does have to be given of an activity that, unlike any other activity or action, never meets the resistance of matter. It is not even hindered or slowed down by sounding out in words, which are formed by sense organs. The experience of the activity of thought is probably the aboriginal source of our notion of spirituality in itself, regardless of the forms it has assumed. Psychologically speaking, one of the outstanding characteristics of thought is its incomparable swiftness—"swift as a thought," said Homer, and Kant in his early writings speaks repeatedly of the Hurtigkeit des Gedankens.49 Thought is swift, clearly, because it is immaterial, and this in turn goes a long way toward explaining the hostility of so many of the great metaphysicians to their own bodies. From the viewpoint of the thinking ego, the body is nothing but an obstacle.
To conclude from this experience that there exist "things in themselves" which, in their own intelligible sphere, are as we "are" in a world of appearances belongs among the metaphysical fallacies, or, rather, semblances of reason, whose very existence Kant was the first to discover, to clarify, and dispel. It seems only proper that this fallacy, like most of the others that have afflicted the tradition of philosophy, should have its source in the experiences of the thinking ego. This one, at any rate, bears an obvious resemblance to a simpler and more common one, mentioned by P. F. Strawson in an essay on Kant: "It is, indeed, an old belief that reason is something essentially out of time and yet in us. Doubtless it has its ground in the fact that ... we grasp [mathematical and logical] truths. But...[one] who grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be timeless."50 It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understa
nd these fallacies as logical non sequiturs—as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as "meaningless" are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, in our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.