References
- René Descartes, “Replies” to the “1st Objections” to the Meditations, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (2 vols.; Cambridge, 1934), II, 13. See also Adam and P. Tannery (eds.), Oeuvres de Descartes (12 vols.; Paris, 1964–75), VII, p. 107, p.335.
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. 2, ch. 1, sec. 19, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p.115.
- Locke, Bk. 2, ch. 27, sec. 9.
- David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, Bk. 1, pt. 4, sec. 2, para. 7/57. 2nd ed. Ed. by P. H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p.190.
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), B131.
- This is not to deny that there are important differences between this doctrine as it is articulated by Descartes and as it is articulated by other philosophers, including Sartre. Richard E. Aquila, “The Cartesian and a Certain ‘Poetic’ Notion of Consciousness,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (Oct.-Dec., 1988): pp.543–62 provides a good review of the differences between Descartes and Locke in their interpretation and use of the thesis that all consciousness is self-consciousness. He also makes brief references to the presence of this thesis in the philosophy of Kant, Hegel and Sartre.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p.1ii. All future references to this work will be noted in the text by BN and the page number.
- Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), p.40. All future references to this work will be followed in the text by TE and the page number.
- I have argued in “Through the Looking Glass: Sartre on Knowledge and the Pre-reflective Cogito,” Man and World 22 (1989): pp.329–43 that Sartre is unsuccessful in his attempt to maintain that consciousness is both unified and dual at the pre-reflective level.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, trans, from the French (New York: Citadel Press, 4th. paperbound ed., 1966), p.234. All future references to this work will be followed in the text by PI and the page number. In the introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre uses consciousness not knowledge in speaking of pre-reflective self-consciousness, although in other places in BN he slips and describes self-consciousness at the pre-reflective level as knowledge.
- Norman Malcolm, Dreaming (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959; reprinted New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p.66.
- Hilary Putnam, “Dreaming and ‘depth grammar’,” Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp.304–24.
- Daniel Dennett, “Are Dreams Experience?” The Philosophical Review 85(April 1976), p.151.
- D. M. Armstrong, “What is Consciousness?” The Nature of Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p.60.
- I have no desire to defend Armstrong's analysis of consciousness with its reliance on a materialist theory of mind and a perceptual theory of introspection. I am interested in using his example for my own purposes: as a test case for Sartre's claim about the translucency of consciousness.
- Weiskrantz, L., Warrington, E. K., Sanders, M.D., and Marshall, J., “Visual capacity in the hemianopic field following a restricted occipital ablation,” Brain 97 (1974): pp.709–28.
- Weiskrantz, “Some contributions of neuropsychology of vision and memory to the problem of consciousness,” Consciousness in Contemporary Science, ed. by A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 186.
- Weiskrantz, p. 186.
- Weiskrantz, p. 187.
- There have been attacks on this blindsight research but none which would affect the use to which I will be putting this research. Weiskrantz discusses these attacks, pp. 191–92.
- Relying on the distinction he draws between consciousness and knowledge in the introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims the subject of analysis has always been conscious of his fundamental choice although he may not have known it.
- Although Sartre uses this argument to counter the Freudian view that the drives uncovered by the analyst were unconscious prior to their uncovering, this argument also works to show that not only must the drives and fundamental choice have been conscious, but they must as consciousness have been self-conscious. How else could the subject recognize such drives and choices when they are pointed out by his analyst?
- Alan Allport, “What Concept of Consciousness?” Consciousness in Contemporary Science on pp. 169–70 examines various possible criteria for conscious awareness including a memory criterion for conscious activity. He argues, in a way analogous to my argument here, that according to ordinary language usage, one's ability to remember or report from memory actions and events is “reliable only as a positive indicator” of phenomenal awareness. It does not follow that if a person is unable to recall or report past actions or events that we would say they were not aware of them. Such absence of recall leaves us uncertain about what to say.
- In “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self,” Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. by Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O'Connor (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), Sartre offers a similar argument for his claim that all consciousness is self- consciousness.
- Keith Oatley, “On Changing One's Mind: a possible function of consciousness,” Consciousness in Contemporary Science, pp.369–89.
- Robert Van Gulick, “A Functionalist Plea for Self Consciousness,” The Philosophical Review 97 (April 1988): 149–81. His account, however, splits self-consciousness from introspection and allows even subpersonal symbol-processors to be self-conscious.
- Roderick Chisholm, The First Person, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
- Don Locke, Myself and Others: A Study in our Knowledge of Other Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
- Stephen L. White, “What is it like to be an Homunculus?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987): 148–74 uses this distinction to overcome what he calls “the problem of conscious subsystems” (p. 149), an objection raised against a functionalist account of mind. However, for the purposes of this paper, I will focus only on his claim that such a distinction is possible and I will bypass the use to which he puts this distinction.
- White, p. 152.
- Kathleen V. Wilkes, “——, yìshì, duh, um, and consciousness,” Consciousness in Contemporary Science, pp.35–36.
- Thomas Natsoulas, “Conscious Perception and the Paradox of ‘Blindsight’,” Aspects of Consciousness: Awareness and Self-Awareness, vol. 3, ed. by Geoffrey Underwood (New York: Academic Press, 1982), pp.79–109.
- Marcel Kinsbourne, “Integrated Field Theory of Consciousness,” Consciousness in Contemporary Science, pp.239–56.
- Carlo Umilità, “The Control Operations of Consciousness,” Consciousness in Contemporary Science, pp. 334–356.
- Karl H. Pribram, “Mind, Brain, and Consciousness: The Organization of Competence and Conduct,” The Psychobiology of Consciousness, ed. by Julian M. Davidson and Richard J. Davidson (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), pp. 50–51.
- Wilkes, p.36.
- Donald A. Norman and Tim Shallice, “Attention to Action,” Consciousness and Self-Regulation: Advances in Research and Theory, vol. 4, ed. by Richard J. Davidson, Gary E. Schwartz, & David Shapiro (New York: Plenum Press, 1986), pp. 1–18.
- Peter Carruthers, “Brute Experience,” Journal of Philosophy 86(May 1989): pp.258–69.
- Natsoulas, p.98.
- Natsoulas, p.97.
- The classical cases of blindsight are those in which the subject reports that he does not see or even ‘feel’ that anything is present in the blind portion of his visual field. See Weiskrantz, p. 189.
- Patricia Smith Churchland, “Consciousness: The Transmutation of a Concept,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): pp.80–95.
- Churchland, p.82. In “Reduction and the Neurobiological Basis of Consciousness,” Consciousness in Contemporary Science, pp.273–304, Churchland uses blindsight studies to undermine the obviousness of the belief “that if someone can report on some visual aspect in the environment then he must be consciously aware of it” (p.288).
- See Anthony J. Marcel, “Conscious and Unconscious Perception: Experiments on Visual Masking and Word Recognition,” Cognitive Psychology, 15 (1983) pp.197–237 and “Conscious and Unconscious Perception: An Approach to the Relations between Phenomenal Experience and Perceptual Processes,” Cognitive Psychology, 15 (1983): pp.238–300.
- If one wishes to argue that by definition all perception is conscious, then one could simply characterize these cases as involving non-conscious processing of perceptual, or what becomes perceptual, data. The point here is whether it might make sense to simply deny consciousness is involved in these cases.
- Indeed there seems to be mounting evidence to this effect offered, among many other places, in Richard Nisbett's and Lee Ross’ studies on human inference strategies reported in Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980). See Churchland, “Consciousness: The Transmutation of a Concept” for a good overview of this kind of evidence.
- Sartre uses parentheses around ‘of’ to indicate he is referring to pre-reflective self-consciousness.