Chapter 5 The Simplicity Argument and the Quality of Consciousness
Quality therefore is immediate determinateness, and as such is prior and must constitute the Beginning. hegel, Science of Logic ∵
1 Introduction to the Chapter
The simplicity argument plays a major role in both an epistemological as well as an ontological context. Since these two uses will be very different and distinct, they must be treated separately. Historically, the Achilles argument dominates the epistemic theories of consciousness in the subjective idealism of Kant and it also assumes a critical role in the objective idealism of Hegel (and later Sar- tre). More specifically, the issue turns on the difference between the functions the categories of Quality and Quantity serve for the two philosophers and the reasons for their divergence. The thesis of the current chapter is that in individual consciousness quali- ties as simple, immaterial existents are intrinsically immediate, transient, and inherently incapable of being incorporated within strict determinist, i.e., causal structures. This essential limitation applies to both psychoanalysis and the current neurosciences as they pursue their different methods of gaining insight into human behavior, its prediction, and/or its control. Consciousness has two elements: passive contents and relational acts, and both have to be adequately accounted for. In Feeling Lonesome, in the chapter titled “The Unconscious and the Subcon- scious,” I discuss at length Kant’s creative “productive imagination”—as distin- guished from its empirical or “re-productive” counterpart, which is restricted to phenomenal sensations and the empirical “association of ideas” principle. The productive imagination is spontaneous. It is inherently generative and therefore responsible for the creation of immanent time-consciousness as well as the unity of apperception. I cannot emphasize enough that when I de- scribe the mind as active or spontaneous, this is the most essential feature of
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004385979_006
consciousness. Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and later Bergson, Husserl, Royce, and Sartre all invoke its centering virtues. Hegel is more subtle and circumspect as he disguises his notion of spontaneity within his dialecti- cal method of progressively positing, negating, and unification but its powers are clearly implicit in the transcending features of the dialectic as we observed in his description of the passage from Sense-Certainty to Perception when he connects the subject to the object in the Phenomenology (Section 116) and in the Philosophy of Mind (Sections 456, 457). For Schopenhauer, although he does not specifically mention spontaneity, it forms the basis for his transcendent metaphysical Will as it indirectly but “in- fluentially” surfaces through phenomenal self-consciousness. In one fashion or another, however, each thinker—e.g., Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer—is careful in his own fashion to make a critical allowance for the active nature of consciousness. But if the activity of consciousness is initially spontaneous, its immaterial contents essentially consist of determinate but unextended qualities.1 Accordingly, the initiating formative power of the mind has to be at- tributed to acts of spontaneity that are capable of generating relations as well as structures of connection that impregnate the soul with intentionality and meaning. But unlike Kant’s overly restrictive rigorous principles that limits the relational categories to only twelve, as Husserl suggests, there are innumerable synthetic a priori possibilities of connection that are operative as long as they are logically compossible (Leibniz), as long as they avoid internal contradic- tions and ring true in eidetic intuition and insight. Although Hume sought to emulate Newton’s influence in the realm of the natural sciences with his own version of psychological gravitation through the “association of ideas” principle, his challenge was very different because Hume also quite deliberately turned loose the swarms of impressions and then it became impossible to rebundle them without an active force in conscious- ness to unify them, to knit them together. Following Francis Hutcheson, this led to Hume’s “new scene of thought” (Kemp Smith, Philosophy of David Hume, 18–20). In effect, Hume collapsed the distinction between the immediacy of im- pressions and the mediacy of relations by reducing them to feelings, to senti- ments of belief as opposed to a system of knowledge. With this strategy, Hume basically replaces reason with the imagination and relations with feelings.
1 Ben Mijuskovic, “The Simplicity Argument and the Unconscious: Plotinus, Cudworth, Leib- niz, and Kant,” Philosophy and Theology, 20:1&2 (2008–09), 53–83; “Kant’s Reflections on the Unity of Consciousness, Time-Consciousness, and the Unconscious,” Kritike, 4:2 (2010), 105– 132; Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness (Santa Barbara, CA: Prae- ger, 2015), Chapter 7, “The Unconscious and the Subconscious,” 149–172; and “The Cognitive and Motivational Roots of Loneliness,” Addressing Loneliness; Coping, Prevention and Clinical Interventions (London: Routledge, 2015), 20–33.