| 5886 | Like the eye, the soul has no power to see itself, but sees other things [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: The soul has not the power of itself to see itself, but, like the eye, the soul, though it does not see itself, yet discerns other things. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.xxvii) | |
| A reaction: The soul is a complex item which contributes many layers of interpretation to what it sees, so there is scope for parts of the soul seeing other parts. Somewhere in the middle Cicero seems to be right - there is an elusive something we can't get at. |
| 1316 | Introspection always discovers perceptions, and never a Self without perceptions [Hume] |
| Full Idea: I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature [1739], I.IV.6) | |
| A reaction: The first half can hardly be denied, but I think the second half is just false. What you observe is not just a raw neutral sense-datum, floating in nothing, but a sense-datum that is deeply coloured by MY interests, interpretations and values. |
| 5551 | I have no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself [Kant] |
| Full Idea: I have no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B158) | |
| A reaction: The key thought of the 'transcendental ego', showing a clear difference from Descartes, who thinks he directly knows himself (Idea 1401). He disagrees with Hume (Idea 1317) when he says there is an appearance. What could the true ego be like? |
| 12115 | Introspection is pure illusion; we can obviously observe everything except ourselves [Comte] |
| Full Idea: The pretended direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion. ...It is clear that, by an inevitable necessity, the human mind can observe all phenomena directly, except its own. | |
| From: Auguste Comte (Intro to Positive Philosophy [1830], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I recently heard of a university psychology department which was seeking skilled introspectors to help with their researches. I take introspection to be very difficult, but partially possible. Read Proust. |
| 24144 | A cognitive mechanism wanting to know itself is absurd! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: A cognitive mechanism that wants to know itself!! We definitely should have moved beyond this absurd goal! (The stomach that consumes itself! -) | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1884-85 [1884], 26[018]) | |
| A reaction: We see his point, but Nietzsche learns a huge amount about himself by introspection. To know the Self is a cat chasing its tail. I don't have to leave England to study England. |
| 2932 | 'Know thyself' is impossible and ridiculous [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: "Everybody is farthest away - from himself"; and the maxim "know thyself" addressed to human beings by a god, is almost malicious. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay (Joyful) Science [1882], §335) | |
| A reaction: Expressed with characteristcally Nietzschean brio, but I couldn't agree more, and it is a very important truth. You can only require full self-knowledge if the whole mind is available to be known, and that isn't even remotely the case. |
| 7157 | We think each thought causes the next, unaware of the hidden struggle beneath [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: On the table of our consciousness there appears a succession of thoughts, as if one thought were the cause of the next. But in fact we don't see the struggle going on under the table -- | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[103]) | |
| A reaction: A brilliant thought. I am increasingly struck by my own lack of control over my 'trains' of thought. I am a slave to my own thinking. |
| 5689 | Freud and others have shown that we don't know our own beliefs, feelings, motive and attitudes [Freud, by Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Freud persuaded many that beliefs, wishes and feelings are sometimes unconscious, and even sceptics about Freud acknowledge that there is self-deception about motive and attitudes. | |
| From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Sydney Shoemaker - Introspection p.396 | |
| A reaction: This seems to me obviously correct. The traditional notion is that the consciousness is the mind, but now it seems obvious that consciousness is only one part of the mind, and maybe even a peripheral (epiphenomenal) part of it. |
| 20429 | Most of us are too close to our own motives to understand them [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The motives we actually experience are too close to us to enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.30) | |
| A reaction: Fry is defending the role of art in clarifying and highlighting such things, but I am not convinced by his claim. We can grasp most of our motives with a little introspection, and those we can't grasp are probably too subtle for art as well. |
| 5380 | In perceiving the sun, I am aware of sun sense-data, and of the perceiver of the data [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When I am acquainted with 'my seeing the sun', it seems plain that on the one hand there is the sense-datum which represents the sun to me, on the other hand there is that which sees this sense-datum. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: This appears to flatly contradict Hume's scepticism about seeing his 'self', but maybe Russell is only aware of his body, and then fictionalises a 'self' as the controller of this body. But I agree with Russell. I am the thing that cares about the sun. |
| 7116 | When we are unreflective (as when chasing a tram) there is no 'I' [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There is no 'I' on the unreflected level. When I run after a tram, ...there is no I. There is a consciousness of the tram-needing-to-be-caught, and a non-positional consciousness of consciousness. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Transcendence of the Ego [1937], I (B)) | |
| A reaction: Russell (Idea 5380) says exactly the opposite. My sympathies are more with Russell. I don't just focus on the tram, I focus on the relation between myself and the tram, and that includes my need to catch it, as well as my body. |
| 7124 | The Ego never appears except when we are not looking for it [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: The Ego never appears except when we are not looking for it. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Transcendence of the Ego [1937], II (D)) | |
| A reaction: He denies that we know the Ego when engaged with the world, and agrees with Hume that the ego can't be directly known. All that is left is this, which seems to be introspection 'out of the corner of your eye'. Not persuasive. |
| 1354 | We cannot introspect states of anger or panic [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: No one could introspectively scrutinize the state of panic or fury. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: It depends what you mean by 'scrutinize'. No human being ever loses their temper or panics without a background thought of "Oh dear, I'm losing it - it would probably be better if I didn't" (or, as Aristotle might say, "I'm angry, and so I should be"). |
| 1353 | Reporting on myself has the same problems as reporting on you [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: My reports on myself are subject to the same kinds of defects as are my reports on you. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This may be true of memories or of motives, but it hardly seems to apply to being in pain, where you might be totally lying, where the worst I could do to myself is exaggerate. "You're fine; how am I?" |
| 5661 | We identify experiences by their owners, so we can't define owners by their experiences [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Normally we identify experiences in terms of the persons whose experiences they are; but this will lead to a vicious circle if persons themselves are to be analysed in terms of their experiences. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §I) | |
| A reaction: This (from a leading empiricist) is a nice basic challenge to all empiricist accounts of personal identity. One might respond my saying that the circle is not vicious. There are two interlinked concepts (experience and persons), like day and night. |
| 15815 | Sartre says the ego is 'opaque'; I prefer to say that it is 'transparent' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Sartre says the ego is 'opaque'; I would think it better to say that the ego is 'transparent'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: Insofar as we evidently have a self, I would say it is neither. It is directly experienced, through willing, motivation, and mental focus. |
| 3468 | I cannot observe my own subjectivity [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I cannot observe my own subjectivity. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 4.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite clear what Searle is complaining about. He knows very clearly that there is a subjective aspect to his life - so how does he know that fact? There must be something supporting this widely held belief. |
| 3363 | We often can't decide what emotion, or even sensation, we are experiencing [Kim] |
| Full Idea: It is not always easy for us to determine what emotion (or even physical sensations) we are experiencing. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Philosophy of Mind [1996], p. 18) | |
| A reaction: Confused sensations are, I would have thought, rare. Emotions, I think, are only confused when they are weak, and then a lot of the confusion is merely verbal. Our body and intuitions understand the feeling well enough, but we lack the vocabulary. |
| 3412 | How do we distinguish our anger from embarrassment? [Kim] |
| Full Idea: How do we know that we are angry rather than embarrassed? | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Philosophy of Mind [1996], p.159) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question, because the only answer I (or anyone?) can think of is that they are distinguished by their content. Event A is annoying, while event B is embarrassing. Either of those feelings is almost inconceivable without its content. |
| 3102 | Why don't we experience or remember going to sleep at night? [Magee] |
| Full Idea: As a child it was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience going to sleep, and never remembered it. When my sister said 'Nobody remembers that', I just thought 'How does she know?' | |
| From: Bryan Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher [1997], Ch.I) | |
| A reaction: This is actually evidence for something - that we do not have some sort of personal identity which is separate from consciousness, so that "I am conscious" would literally mean that an item has a property, which it can lose. |
| 5674 | We can't introspect ourselves as objects, because that would involve possible error [Cassam] |
| Full Idea: One can identify an object in a mirror as oneself, but that brings with it the possibility of misidentification, so since introspective awareness statements are immune to error, one is not introspectively aware of oneself as an object. | |
| From: Quassim Cassam (Introduction to 'Self-Knowledge' [1994], §I) | |
| A reaction: As a pure argument this looks weak. There could be two sorts of knowledge of objects, one admitting possible error, the other not. Introspecting pain appears to be awareness of oneself as an object. Planning my future needs my body. |
| 6671 | It seems impossible to get generally applicable mental concepts from self-observation [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: It seems impossible for me to acquire perfectly general concepts of thought and feeling, applicable to other people as well as to myself, purely from some queer kind of mental self-observation, but this is what the observational model demands. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I don't understand the word 'queer' here, which seems part of an odd modern fashion for denigrating introspection. It is right, though, that the acquisition of general mental concepts from my mind seems to depend on analogy, which is a suspect method. |
| 3518 | I'm not the final authority on my understanding of maths [Maslin] |
| Full Idea: I may be the final authority on whether my shoe pinches, but I am manifestly not the final authority on whether I understand some mathematical theorem. | |
| From: Keith T. Maslin (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2001], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: However, it doesn't follow that his teachers are the final authority either, because he may get correct answers by an algorithm, and bluff his way when demonstrating his understanding. Who knows whether anyone really understands anything? |