"Russell, Wittgenstein and Cogito ergo sum"
remarks on a paper by Antony Flew
presented in Washington DC
on the 25th of March, 2000
This paper brings back vividly those heady days of Oxford philosophy when Wittgenstein was nearing the end of his life and we were all afire with his contraband typescripts: the Blue Book, the Brown Book and (though I missed out on this myself) the "Lectures on Mathematics". It also raises the question of why Russell, in his My Philosophical Development (Allen and Unwin, 1959) and his Foreword to Gellner’s Words and Things (Gollancz, 1959), makes no mention of these typescripts in attacking Oxford linguistic philosophy and puts all the blame on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, not published until two years after Wittgenstein’s death. It also questions why Russell was willing to respond to Ryle’s The Concept of Mind with respectful disagreement, apparently not realising that Ryle had been stimulated not only by the Blue Book etc but by personal encounters with Wittgenstein, beginning in 1930. [And, as I have said in my book, there is evidence that Wittgenstein was also stimulated by Ryle.]
More particularly, Flew’s paper tells a strange story of Wittgenstein’s being invited to reply to a paper by an undergraduate, Oscar Wood, at the Jowett Society in 1947, and saying nothing about the paper’s subject, "Cogito ergo sum", until Pritchard asked him about it directly: whereupon he replied "Cogito ergo sum. That’s a very peculiar sentence", pointing to his own head at the words "cogito" and "sum". Flew, at the meeting, thought this "perverse but no doubt entirely characteristic", but in later years "realised that, by thus reminding his audience that the referents of the token-reflexive word ‘I’ are the flesh and blood people who utter it to refer to themselves, Wittgenstein might have been suggesting a radical and totally devastating objection to the position which Descartes had reached in the second paragraph of Part IV of his Discourse on the Method. For it is simply false to maintain that the referent of this word is an incorporeal and yet substantial subject of consciousnes. It is, on the contrary, a flesh and blood human being."
My own summary of this point is the four-line dialogue
"Who were you talking about?"
"That chap over there."
"And who was he talking about?"
"Me" (tapping one’s chest).
Flew sets this paper in a context of criticising Russell not merely for a shallow understanding of ‘late Wittgenstein’ and ‘Oxford philosophy’, but for failing to look for what relevance they might have to Kant’s three great questions of philosophy --- God, Freedom and Immortality. Wittgenstein has references to all of these in his notes, especially in the notes he wrote in preparation for Part II of Investigations and in the notes written even later, and I am told by TP Uschanov of Helsinki that there exist notes by Smythies on two lectures on freedom of the will delivered in 1939; but nowhere in his notebooks does Wittgenstein provide us with a sustained discussion of any of the three. [This is not true. In my book I give references for notes on freedom of the will writen in the thirties, their summary in Investigations paragraphs, and a final paragrap in which he put his ideas into a common sense droplet, in my view more valuable than a sustained discussion.] Here, leaving aside God and Freedom, I shall sketch my own views on the third problem, modified over the years by my study of Wittgenstein texts and by encounters with people who have influenced me at different times.
In Iris and Other Minds I put forward a much simplified viewpoint. I accepted neurological evidence that without neural activity there could be no memory, but maintained that this did not apply to consciousness. Such a distinction must seem sheer superstition to any biologically educated modern. Consciousness’s dependence on neural activity must surely be as absolute as memory’s. Distinguishing between them will be as pointless as trying to argue that while our senses of taste and smell vanish with our death, our senses of sight and hearing can survive.
The distinction I should have been drawing was one of meaning, not neurology. To make my argument I needed to claim that it was meaningful to suppose that consciousness could function without the dead body’s neural activity, while supposing memory to do so was meaningless. But this would have been a useless path to take. We can suppose whatever we want to. I distinctly remember, in my days as a pious Catholic, meaningfully supposing that after death a soul transmitted some essence that was not the person who had died, who would only come into existence again when a new body was created at the resurrection, to be animated by that soul. This belief was influenced by a paper Elizabeth Anscombe read at Spode in perhaps 1962. Catholics who had not heard that paper would have carried on meaningfully supposing that between death and resurrection the person who had died did indeed continue to exist in the form of a (more orthodox) disembodied soul, and they would have been shocked to be told that in that disembodied interim their dead friends could not be said to exist. And what about the meaningfulness of belief in the resurrection itself? As the years have passed and sanity (I hope) has taken over, the idea of our physical re-creation has come to seem utterly preposterous to me, but I cannot agree that it follows from that that while I held it it was meaningless.
In taking my argument further there are three threads that I hope to be able to plait together. First, it seems to me plain that, in believing their dead friends still to exist in the form of disembodied souls, Catholics and others are misusing personal pronouns and the concept of a person. In so far as what they believe is meaningful, meaning is obtained at the expense of that misuse. That, of course, may not worry them: they will claim that they have not misused those pronouns and that concept but merely extended their use. Descartes, I shall try to show, was equally guilty on this count, but he is redeemed philosophically by the fact that his misuse was carried out with panache and with considerable and illuminating interest.
A second thread to follow is the psychology of our human hunger for immortality. In this, I take for granted that people who suffer from no such hunger themselves will still be interested in what it is that afflicts such a remarkable number who find the question important. It occurs to me as a possible pointer to this psychological problem that, in fact, many people do have fantasies about survival experiences that involve sight and sound but not smell, taste or touch. If one’s picture of survival is a dimensionless point which observes, then it might seem natural to posit that this point sees and hears, whereas its being able to smell, taste and touch would seem rather far fetched. Nevertheless, I cannot believe that there is anything in our neurology that distinguishes sight and sound from the other senses in this radical manner, any more than consciousness and memory are so distinguished, so I shall not pursue this intriguing fact of fantasy-psychology.
Instead, I shall take up my third thread, the psychology of Descartes’ manner of expressing his argument. Since I no longer have his Discours to hand in French, Latin or English I have to rely on Flew’s quotation from it. I hope Descartes scholars will put me right if I am wrong. The quotation is as follows.
"I could suppose that I had no body and that there was no world or place where I was, but I could not by the same token suppose that I did not exist . . . From this I knew that I was a substance the essence or nature of which simply was to think; and which, to exist, needs no place and has no dependence on any material thing. Consequently, I, that is to say my mind --- what makes me what I am --- am entirely distinct from my body; and, furthermore, the former is more easily known than the latter, while if the latter did not exist the former could be all that it is."
This comes from "the paragraph in Part IV of his Discourse on the Method immediately subsequent to that in which Descartes insists upon the irrefragible certainty of the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ ". I have substituted "my" for "the" in front of "body". Flew also quotes Ryle’s summary of Descartes’ thesis.
"With the doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function" (from page 11 of The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949).
What is wrong with Descartes’ thesis is that it takes for granted that our minds are what we essentially are, and therefore what we want to be preserved if we hunger after immortality. What we essentially are, of course, what constitutes us, is what we appear to be when we meet each other. This appearance is not an illusion. There may be repects in which we come to know better who we are with more experience and insight, and similarly we may come to know other people better, and they us. The ways in which we we come to know ourselves better are often different from the way we come to know other people better, but there is no fundamental conflict between these ways of knowing. Knowledge of oneself and knowledge of one’s acquaintances are both improvable, and the more we improve them the less divergence there is between them.
While people have a natural bias towards thinking that their knowledge of the ‘person they know from inside’ has some superior reliability compared with the ‘person known from outside by others’, there is no absolute reason why this should be so, or why the one should deserve more than the other to be present in an after-life. The ground for this bias is that the person ‘known from inside’ is the ‘one we know best’ --- but this means the one we know most intimately, not the one we know most accurately. This quality of intimacy, which we all recognise but find extremely difficult to express, is what makes us so anxious to hang on to ‘the person known from within’.
For all of which, the word "mind" does very well, but the fact remains that our familiarity with this mind is something that has grown with our lives as beings of flesh and blood.
Many years ago I thought I had an answer to the problem of the ‘personal essence’. I was not thinking of Descartes but of Hume and his assertion that what he knew as making himself up was simply the assembly of experiences, thoughts and feelings that he had accumulated in his life, and that he could detect no central thread holding this assembly together. Of course, I said, it was his consciousness of the items of this assembly that held them all together. Twenty years later I have found no reason to disagree with this view. My disagreement is with the way the idea is liable to be expressed: that the consciousness that holds these experiences together is the essential me, is who I am. I do not believe I ever used such terminology myself, but I cannot be sure. I expressed my ideas in diaries which I wrote at the time, which may come to light one day, and if they do I hope I shall not turn out to have been guilty of what I now regard as a fundamental error.
The only reasonable meaning that can be given to such phrases as "the essential me" is what I should answer if I am asked who I am. I was born at such and such a date in such and such a place, my name is such and such, the things I have done have tended to change over the years but there is a certain recognisable pattern about them, the things I most enjoy remembering are these and these, the things that most upset me to remember are those and those, these are the kind of jokes I tend to make --- and so on and so forth. Why should all that be encapsulated when I die and projected into eternity? And if research shows that I have been wrong in some of my descriptions of myself, and that my assessment should be changed as follows . . . why should that be projected into eternity either?
If one considers the problem from this viewpoint, it is easy to understand Descartes’ strategy. He not only wanted survival but certainty as well. There was no doubt that he, Descartes, was thinking, and if he could identify his thought, or his ability to think, with his ‘real self’, then whether that could survive could appear to depend on the thought-experiment which he had just conducted. Such sentences as "I am planting seeds in my garden, therefore I am" or "I am holding a pen in my hand and wondering what to write next with it, therefore I am", while equally certain, would not have offered the same thought-experimental gambit. He could imagine his thoughts to be going on without a body for them to be going on in. He could not possibly imagine planting seeds in his garden without a hand to hold them in. Consequently, by identifying his real self with his thoughts (or the ability to think similar thoughts) he could imagine his real self to exist without a body. Add to this his certainty about the fact that he was thinking, and he obtains a certainty that his real self will exist without a body.
Now I have often wondered whether the true meaning of Descartes’ "cogito" was "I am conscious" rather than "I am thinking". Flew says that he wrote his argument in French before he translated it into Latin, or at least that he published in French before he did so in Latin, and I cannot believe that "je pense" could have the meaning "I am conscious". Nevertheless, I can still wonder how Descartes’ gambit might have proceded if I had been right about the meaning of "cogito".
There are (and as I have said, I hope I was never one of them) people who, fascinated by the phenomena of consciousness --- the beauty of particular scents or tastes or sights or sounds or experiences of touch --- say "these experiences, and my ability to have many others like them, my consciousness of them, and the wonder and excitement they evoke in me --- all that is the real me". The psychology behind this conviction would be a very interesting one to investigate. Similarly, a quasi-Descartes gambit based on it would be a very interesting one to reconstruct. However, since I have already declared that I do not believe that anything like that does constitute a real me or a real anybody else, I think I can reasonably leave those tasks to other people, and simply ask what is left of Descartes’ gambit if we restrict ourselves to my own rather minimalist position.
This, to repeat, is that there is no ‘real me’ outside the life-long sum of my experiences; that my consciousness of these experiences is indeed a thread that holds them together, but does not constitute a real me separable from them; that I should like, as much as Descartes, to believe that this consciousness can exist without my body, but that even if I could assure myself of that it wouldn’t follow that any kind of ‘real me’ can exist without my body. What remains, therefore, is simply the question: what relevance could some Descartes type of gambit have to the possibility of my consciousness, that is of some successor to what I now call my consciousness, existing without my body?
My answer is a simple one. The gambit could take Descartes exactly four English words into his argument: "I could suppose that . . ." Suppose what? "I had no body" falls immediately, for we have so far no 'I' to have no body. The next words would have to be "consciousness continued", without any implication that it is my consciousness. Since "I" has already fallen, "I was a substance" falls too, but the question might arise whether this supposedly continuing conscousness was a substance. On examination I find no meaning in this question. I take "substance" in this kind of context to mean something with an identity, something to which a name can be attached, something that can be recognised. This requirement is part of the myth that sustains our desire for immortality: that after death there will be surviving individuals who can recognise and greet each other and enquire into one another’s well-being.
Flew discusses the requirement, without going into the myth that requires it, immediately after his quotation from Descartes. His Rylean analogy for the word "minds" with words like "tempers" and "grins" is apposite but in my view not needed as an argument, for the consciousness that I am supposing to survive simply could not expect to recognise or be recognised, let alone be named.
Our new Descartes would have to say "yes, I can suppose that consciousness continues, but from my ability to suppose this there cannot follow that it actually does", whereas the old Descartes, in tying what he could suppose to "a substance the essence or nature of which simply was to [be conscious]", to what makes him what he is, was aiming at a certainty that what he was supposing to continue therefore did continue.
Here I come to a point which none of the people to whom I submitted Iris and Other Minds could swallow. Granted that I was only supposing that consciousness continues after death, and not arguing for its doing so, and granted that I gave no meaning to any kind of identification of any consciousness that continues, and granted that I make no claim that this consciousness that continues is in any sense me, how on earth can I claim that it is a continuation of what I can properly call my consciousness now? For if I cannot claim that, the whole point of the exercise (namely to give some comfort to the human hunger for immortality) is lost. Nothing seems to be left but a kind of consciousness-soup into which we all indistinguishably dissolve. Without identification, how can there be distinctivenes? Or to put a point made by Flew in the last esay in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Flew and Macintyre, SCM Press, 1955 --- a date when consciousness-soup had not appeared on the theological scene --- "news of the immortality of my soul would be of no more concern to me than news that my appendix would be preserved eternally in a bottle".
What I am convinced of is that any person who experiences vivid consciousness of any kind (including pain) will understand what it can mean to hope (or fear) that that consciousness will continue after death --- or, equally, to resign oneself to, or rejoice in, nothing of the kind happening. In allowing pain and the fear of it to come into question I am in no way intending to give respectability to ideas of posthumous punishment, myths of which we ought to have grown out of by now. Come to that, ideas of postumous reward are out of place in my view too, because they require a concept of posthumous identification --- this disembodied soul deserves this to happen to it. My argument merely has the form "what is sauce for the goose isn't sauce for the gander". The sauce I approve of is the meaningfulness of supposing that pleasant or unpleasant experiences might continue after death. The sauce I disapprove of is interpreting this ‘possibility of meaning’ in a context of judgement, reward, punishment and individual identifiability after death. And I might add, having mentioned the changes that have come over theology since 1955, that I can’t accept the idea that while posthumous punishment is theologically incorrect, posthumous reward is quite acceptable. Both have to be abandoned if there is no posthumous identification.
Descartes’ disembodiable mind needed to constitute what he called a substance, and the same is surely true of any interpretation of whatever might be meant by a disembodied soul. From the arguments above it will be clear that I do not regard posthumous consciousness (if it takes place) as constituting a substance, and therefore it cannot correspond to what any theologian would mean by a soul. My profoundly held belief is that the way the universe works does not need the theological properties of souls, any more than it needs a designing God (or a judging one). Of the arguments that were directed at my Iris and Other Minds, the most telling one (reconstructed in my own words) was: "From what you say it follows that consciousness somehow pops into the foetus, experiences all the riches of a full life, pops into some conscious-of-we-know-not-what limbo, and then pops into some other foetus, to be conscious of another life, but without any development resulting from the previous life’s riches --- for those riches were part of a flesh-and-blood life which has ceased to exist". What I found telling about this complaint was that it expressed an instinctive conviction among spiritually-minded people that the living of a life must result in spiritual growth - or, at least, change.
Let me make it clear that while the idea of reincarnation was at the back of my mind when I wrote Iris and Other Minds, I was in no way trying to argue for it, and am still not. A sympathetic reader of what I have said in the present paper will appreciate that I do believe that ideas of reincarnation are meaningful at what might be called a day-dream level. I can suppose that this person continues the consciousness of that person who has died. Nevertheless, to assert that this person carries on the consciousness of that other person is, while meaningful, idle; and actually to claim any authority for such an assertion is worse than idle - it is pernicious. This distinction corresponds, I believe, to one made by Flew in the essay I have already quoted from: we understand "the hopes of the warriors of Allah who expect if they die in Holy War to go straight to the arms of the black-eyed houris in paradise", but that understanding is no argument for a doctrinal assertion of personal immortality.
Yet the accusation put in my own words above did make me weaken and consider that perhaps the carrying of consciousness, if it took place, from one person to another, did have something soul-like about it, in so far as we felt an instinctive need to believe that there would be something appropriate about this (good) life leading to consciousness in that (perhaps better) life, and this (bad) life leading to consciousness in that (perhaps more uncomfortable) life. A soul that has the status of a substance does, of course, make it easier to handle dramatic or poetic accounts of such things (like Dante’s), but once one digests the idea that the universe’s working does not need such aids, one can accept that any appropriateness there may be in the continuity of consciousness between one life and another is out of one’s hands anyway. If no continuity of consciousness take place one will never know. If it takes place without any appropriateness of merit one will never know. If it takes place with complete appropriateness one will not know that either. If it happens, it will just happen. All one can acknowledge before it happens or fails to happen is that one would prefer one’s consciousness to continue (if it continues at all, and with all due admission that continuity does not mean the continuation of anything one can call one’s own) in a happy life rather than a miserable one. And people who want to attach importance to merit and its reward can perfectly well believe some analogy along those lines without populating the universe with an ontology of souls and their attributes or a God who singles them out to judge them.
My opening simplistic distinction between memory and consciousness in their requirements of neural activity can now be completely discarded. I see no point in hoping for some solve-everything neurological discovery that will tell us that our consciousness in this life does not, after all, need neural activity to keep it going. In this life, of course it does. Anyone who has encountered a corpse will know that.
Naturally, the problem is simplified if we do not stand out for an incorporeal limbo between one life and another. A time-gap between two lives is no discontinuity if, ex hypothesi, there is no consciousness during it. Nor is there any need to ask what it is that provides continuity between two lives. The simple thought experiment "wouldn’t you rather your present consciousness turned out to be continuous with consciousness in a happy life than an unhappy one?" is a guarantee of the meaningfulness of such continuity as I am positing, and (though no doubt there are many people who will tell me that there is something I am blind to) I see no need to consider this continuity’s mechanism.
What, however, if we do hanker after incorporeal consciousness (for good and all after death, or in between lives, as you please)? Possibly misquoting what I remember a friend saying nearly twenty years ago, "there was cosmic consciousness and then I was born, and all that stopped". It must be rather fine to be able to say that. Wordsworth had thoughts along those lines. Can we not dream that the future might turn out like that too?
My argument that we can suppose (or imagine, or dream) whatever we want to has limits. Descartes could have said "I am planting seeds in my garden therefore I am", but he could not meaningfully suppose that this I was planting seeds without a hand to hold them in. I remember Isaiah Berlin giving me such an example. The legend of St Denis of Paris has it that after being beheaded he picked his head up and walked about preaching through its mouth. Clearly, a factual impossibility, not an impossibility of meaning. But what, Isaiah went on, if the legend had said "and he kissed his mouth"? Holding his head in one hand he could have put his lips to his other hand and kissed that, but what could constitute kissing his mouth? Certainly not smacking his lips.
In all these continuity cases I can argue: "Yes, I can imagine such events, but I cannot imagine circumstances in which I could have any practical assurance that they had taken place --- let alone will take place." Many friends tell me that they can remember previous lives. Here, my inability to visualise any mechanism that could enable them so to remember reduces me to concluding that it is all an invention, though to be consistent I have to admit that it is an invention that they can meaningfully indulge in. Wordsworth had childhood experiences that he believed came from before his birth, and his poetry makes it easy for us to believe him, but if someone alive now were to tell me that he remembered being Wordsworth, and remembered those experiences, and could vouch for Wordsworth’s claim that they came from before his birth, I should be extremely sceptical. What I remember now must, practically, be encoded in my neurology, but if someone whose word I trusted told me that at his birth (or in the womb) an influx of consciousness had imprinted in his neurology experiences of a cosmic kind that he subsequently felt to be part of his memory, I should accept that this might be so, without needing to conclude that, somehow, a disembodied cosmic memory had travelled through time and lodged itself in him.
Yet I look in vain in what I have written for any conclusive argument that we cannot meaningfully believe we could have (read, on my interpretation, that continuing consciousness could have) experiences that might lead a posthumous consciousness to express itself in the form "I remember wondering, before I died, what would happen after I died, and by George things have turned out well". So until anyone can produce better arguments than I can, people are, for my part, welcome to cherish such beliefs. I do not cherish them myself. Something more compelling convinces me that I have no need of them.
This consciousness (of mine, as I can properly call it while I still have it) has a quality that convinces me that even if it could end it could never, if it did survive, lose its idividuality. Whether it could continue, in the terminology I have tried to introduce, continuously with my present consciousness, is a question that there is no need to ask. There is no point. Anxiety on the subject centres on a wish that this present consciousness of mine should turn out to be ‘the real me’, but that is just what it isn’t. What it is is individual. It isn’t anybody else’s consciousness now, and its destiny isn’t consciousness-soup. As to its possibly continuing discontinuously with this consciousness of mine now, whatever that might mean, all I can say is good luck to it: at least it will continue individually. Or the possibility of its continuing at all is a dream, and it will just stop. One doesn’t need to give a damn. It will have been jolly good while it lasted.
There is a point made in the penultimate paragraph of Death, the essay already quoted from New Essays in Philosophical Theology. It is an indubitable fact that people have private experiences. Might these occur disembodied? And could we somehow derive from this apparent possibility an extended concept of ‘person’, so that we could talk of disembodied persons (a little less improbable-sounding than disembodied people)? A disturbing image is thereby conjured up of disembodied personalities hovering at the bottom of our gardens. How could we ever know they were there? How distinguish one from another? I hope it is clear that this line of thought is not part of the programme I have argued. Such meaning as I can conjure up for a disembodied consciousness requires it to be conscious-in-continuity with the consciousness belonging now to our individual selves, not floating in the air (or anywhere else) to be considered by us ‘from the outside’ (or for that matter to be considered and judged by God ‘from the outside’). I can’t say any more to clarify this. If I have failed already I have failed altogether.
As an absolutely final point, however, I think I should say that the essay by RM Hare mentioned near the end of my "MSS 130-138" is also in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (along with three further essays by Flew). Hare does use the word "blik", and to more cogent effect than I remembered in 1995, when I copied those manuscripts, but he does not say that he has taken it from the Afrikaans. I take this as evidence that whether or not I read the essay as originally printed in The University, I did also hear Hare deliver it in person. The London Library, which lent me the volume but did not have the issues of the journal, gave me a full reference for it: "The University", a journal of enquiry, 1950-1952. The complete set would constitute an historical document if anybody can find it. If they do, I hope they will correct a misprint in my own undergraduate contribution to it: "rigorous" (of arguments) misprinted as "vigorous". Perhaps, one day, I shall acquire the gift of vigour in argument --- when, eventually, I have succeeded in achieving rigour in it.
[Having edited the above to the best of my ability in August 2002, I will add an autobiographical detail that may explain how I came to the ideas expounded here. Soon after Diana, Princess of Wales, died, Sholti the conductor followed her. An obituary recounted his struggles, after the war, to establish himself in Germany, to which he must have gone while it was still in ruins. (I cannot believe that merely changing his name from Stern to Solti would have saved him if he had stayed in Hungary through the war). He took conducting jobs wherever he could. Now one of my most powerful musical memories is attending a performance of Fidelioin Wuppertal early in 1946. This obituary made me wonder if Solti had conducted it. Well --- he had died, so after my own death I could perhaps encounter him in spirit and ask him. I cannot say how long it took me to realise how essentially superstitious this fantasy was, but eventually the penny did drop. Survival of individual consciousness is one thing, but its existing in an envelope declaring "The consciousness inside this is Solti's" is preposterously another.]