The Explainability of Experience
Realism and Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Theory of the Human Mind
URSULA RENZ
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Contents
Preface ix
Preface to the English Translation xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: The Explainability of Experience 1
a) Priority and Justification of Realistic Rationalism 2
b) The Different Levels of Spinoza’s Theory of the Human Mind 14
c) Foundations of Knowledge: On the Structure of the Second Part of the Ethics 16
d) Method: The Argumentative Claim behind the mos geometricus 20
e) On the Structure of This Book 23
PART I: The Basic Framework: The Ethics’ Systematic Premises
1. Dissociating the Concept of Substance from the Concept of Subject 29
2. The Conception of Metaphysics in de Deo and Its Implications 35
a) The Claim behind de Deo: Metaphysics as a General Ontology 39
b) Substance Monism as a Commitment to Realism 41
c) On the Categorical Difference between Substance and Mode 43
d) The Meta-Theoretical Claim behind Spinoza’s Necessitarianism and Its Implications for the Theory of Causality 45
e) What It Means for Humans or Human Minds to Be Modes 48
3. The Concept of the Individual and Its Scope 50
a) When Is Something an Individual? 51
b) Physics and Metaphysics: Which Kinds of Entities Are Individuals? 53
c) Bodies Politic and Minds: Authentic and Inauthentic Individuals 58
PART II: The Ontology of the Mental: On the Relationship between Being and Thought
4. The Primacy of the Metaphysics over the Theory of the Mind 65
5. The Concept of Idea and Its Logic 74
a) Ideas as Concepts of the Mind: The Definition of “Idea” in Context 78
b) Representational Content and Epistemic Value: The Problem of the Content of Ideas in Spinoza 82
c) Spinoza’s Epistemic Determinism: The Rejection of the Spontaneity of Fictions 87
6. The Justification of a Realist Rationalism 94
a) Thought as an Attribute: On the Reality of the Mental 95
b) The Assumption of an idea Dei: Intelligibility as a Property of Being 100
c) Necessity, Infinity, Uniqueness: From the Notion of Intelligibility to the Concept of Knowledge 105
7. Body and Mind: What Spinoza’s Theory of Identity Seeks to Achieve 108
PART III: Theory of the Subject: The Concept of the Human Mind and Its Premises
8. The Problem of the Numerical Difference between Subjects 123
9. Finitude, or the Limited Knowability of Finite Things 131
a) Enduring Ideas of Enduring Things: Knowledge of the Existence of Singular Things and Its Empirical Origin 134
b) The Intelligibility of Events, or the Necessity of a View from Nowhere 138
10. The Definition of the Human Mind in Its Derivation 142
a) The Actual Being of the Mind: The Mind Is Knowledge and Not Bearer of Knowledge 145
b) The Contents of the Mind: Holism and Adequacy, or the Human Mind as Part of the Infinite Intellect 149
c) The Functioning of the Mind: The Epistemic Prerequisite of the Awareness of Affections 157
d) The Non-Transferability of the Mind: The Distinctive Objective Reality of Our Self-Knowledge 161
11. Panpsychism, or the Question “What Is the Subject of Experience?” 168
Interlude: The Function of Physics for Spinoza’s Philosophy 175
PART IV: Psychology and Epistemology: The Constitution, Experiential Quality, and Epistemic Value of Content
12. The Constitution of Mental Content in the imaginatio 183
a) Intension and Extension of Spinoza’s Concept of the Imagination and Its Implications 187
b) Synthesis without Spontaneity: On the Perception of the Affections of One’s Own Body and Its Implications 192
c) Transitions between Psychology and Semantics: Associations and Other Genetic Contingencies 198
13. Emotions, or How to Explain Qualities of Experience 206
a) On the Ontology of the Affects: What the Emotions Are, and Why We Have Them 208
b) Affects and Their Histories: The Genetic Reconstruction of the Secondary Affects 216
14. Epistemology: The Possibility of Producing Successful Explanations 223
a) Truth, Adequacy, and the Spectrum of Inadequate Knowledge: The Conceptual Basis of Spinoza’s Epistemic Perfectionism 226
b) The Possibility of Self-Reflection: The Conception of the idea ideae and Its Implications 232
c) The Functional Principle of the Common Notions and the Possibility of Acquiring a General Knowledge of the Human Being 239
d) The Completion of Spinoza’s Realist Rationalism, or the Concept of Intuitive Knowledge 249
e) What Explanations of Subjective Experiences Are, and What They Require 256
Conclusion: Successful Explanation of Experience and Practical
Preface to the English Translation
Every book has its story, and so does this translation. When I visited Yale shortly after Michael Della Rocca’s review of the German original was published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, I heard from Barbara Sattler that Michael, with her help, had made a partial translation in the course of the writing of his review. After the book was awarded the JHP prize, I was encouraged by several colleagues to publish a translation. This plan would never have been realized, though, were it not for the support of various people and institutions. The Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) supported the final translation, by Mark Ilsemann, through a translation grant.
I would like to thank various people without whom this translation would never have been finished. In particular, I would like to thank Barnaby Hutchins, who spent innumerous hours correcting the original translation and discussing problematic passages with me, while Namita Herzl copy-edited the manuscript. I also owe thanks to my research team at Klagenfurt, Namita Herzl, Barnaby Hutchins, Sarah Tropper, and Philip Waldner, who discussed the whole book with me at great length and helped greatly to clarify certain passages. I am very grateful to Peter Ohlin and Lucy Randall at Oxford University Press for their encouragement and patience, as well as their willingness to go through the whole complicated process.
When I discussed the translation with Mark Ilsemann and Barnaby Hutchins, we often preferred more liberal articulations over literal translations. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that while, over the years, many of my views on several details have changed, I am still, overall, committed to the reconstruction of Spinoza that I originally presented ten years ago. While the literature has progressed in that time, my overall views have not changed substantially, and I therefore present them here as originally set out. For this reason, it is only in rare places that I have added references to more recent literature.
While I did not dedicate the German version of this book to anyone—this is not always done in the German-speaking context—I want to dedicate this
Preface to the English Translation
English translation to my father, who passed away three years ago. Although not inclined toward philosophy himself, he never failed to love me for the person I am and to support me along the path I have taken.
Zurich/Klagenfurt, 2017
Abbreviations
Descartes’ Works
AT Adam and Tannery (eds.), Oeuvres de Descartes
CSM Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch (eds. and trans.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (third volume edited by A. Kenny also)
Spinoza’s Works
C Curley (ed.), The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1 & 2
CM Cogitata Metaphysica (an appendix to Spinoza’s DPP)
DPP Renati des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Parts I & II (Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy)
Ep. Spinoza’s Letters
KV Korte Verhandeling van God de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand (Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being)
NS Nagelaten Schrift en (the 1677 Dutch translation of Spinoza’s works)
OP Opera Posthuma
TdIE Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione
TP Tractatus Politicus
TTP Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
Passages in Spinoza’s Ethics are referred to by means of the following abbreviations: a-(xiom), c-(orollary), e-(xplanation), l-(emma), p-(roposition), s-(cholium), and app-(endix); “d” stands for either “definition” (when it appears immediately to the right of the part of the book) or “demonstration” (in all other cases). The five parts of the Ethics are cited by Arabic numerals. Thus, “E1d3” stands for the third definition of part 1 and “E1p16d” for the demonstration of
Abbreviations
proposition 16 of part 1. Passages from DPP are cited using the same system of abbreviations used for the Ethics.
References to Gebhardt (ed.), Spinoza Opera, follow this format: volume number, page number, line number. Hence, “II/200/12” stands for volume 2, page 200, line 12. Passages from AT are cited by volume and page number. Thus, “AT VII 23” stands for page 23 of volume 7 of this edition.
Introduction
The Explainability of Experience
Many tenets of Spinoza’s theoretical philosophy, as laid out in the first parts of the Ethics, can be understood only against the backdrop of the central programmatic conviction that motivates the work as a whole. Put simply, in a manner that resonates with readers even today, this conviction can be expressed as follows: subjective experience is explainable, and its successful explanation is of ethical relevance because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Not only does this conviction guide Spinoza’s major philosophical decisions, it also explains the lasting appeal of his chief work, which, for centuries, has attracted those readers who are truly willing to engage with it. Spinoza’s insight corresponds to an expectation that often, and in a variety of contexts, motivates philosophical reflection: the desire to explain experience is, quite understandably, a central concern for many a philosophical mind.
But congenial as this concern may appear at first glance, to justify the conviction that subjective experience is explainable is a demanding task. It is not enough to elucidate the ontological premises underlying the intelligibility of beings in general; one must also be able to show that the perspectivity of subjective experience—often regarded as irreducible—does not rule out the idea of a general explainability. Furthermore, an anthropologically informed conception of how human beings perceive certain things and events must be developed. In other words, it must be explained how experiential content is formed by the interpretive activity that human beings are capable of. Finally, it must be shown that the explainability of experience contributes to a good life, at all relevant levels: from questions surrounding the organization of the body politic to liberation from neurotic fixations to discussions of a person’s individual need of
salvation. Spinoza’s Ethics attempts all of this, even if the attempt is not fully convincing in all aspects.
I will not be able, in the present reconstruction, to spell out this entire enterprise. I want only to describe the theory of the human mind on which that program is based. That is not to say that I am limiting myself to marginal issues; rather, I am focusing on the systematic center, as it were, of the program outlined above. The theory of the human mind is central, not simply because it appears in the middle of the Ethics, as far as the organization of the text is concerned. More importantly, it is central because not every conception of the mental is compatible with the concern about the explainability of experience. Whether the intuition that experience is explainable makes sense or not depends, crucially, on how the human mind is conceptualized and how its activities are described.
It is the main thesis of this study that Spinoza contemplated this connection more than any other philosopher has. Hence, the question of what is required to show that experience is something that can be explained will also be used to reconstruct and elucidate the most important decisions, concepts, and arguments that Spinoza develops in the Ethics with regard to the human mind. As it turns out, many passages of the Ethics that are barely comprehensible, thanks to their terseness and the rather technical language of the entire work, suddenly become plausible if considered against this background. Thus, Spinoza’s theory of the human mind will be analyzed according to the way in which it takes into account the assumption that human experience is explainable. On the one hand, that means elucidating the requirements that any philosophy of the human mind would have to fulfill to make such a claim. On the other hand, it means addressing the many problems of comprehension that confront any reader of Spinoza’s theory of the human mind.
Before I begin, I would like to spell out a few of the fundamental considerations that lie behind this conviction, as well as comment a little further on some of the methodological premises of this study.
a) Priority and Justification of Realistic Rationalism
Faced with a subjective experience—such as the anguish we may feel upon the death of a close friend from cancer—philosophers are generally presented with two possibilities. On the one hand, they can invoke the impression that often occurs in those moments, namely that experiences of this kind are accessible only to ourselves. And they will therefore maintain that subjective experience is
something that radically eludes concepts employed by us to describe other theoretical entities and that, if experience is to be accessed intersubjectively at all, different categorical and epistemic means would be required. On the other hand, philosophers can also insist that subjective experience can generally be grasped with the same concepts that we employ to describe processes such as the collision of two billiard balls, despite the fact that each subjective experience is structured in such a way that it affects one person in particular. Our experience after being told that our friend has died is different from, say, that of his brother after receiving the same message. And yet, I argue, both experiences are epistemically accessible from a neutral point of view. In other words, a philosopher can also insist that each experience is explainable or intelligible in a strict sense, and not only comprehensible through empathy or in its subjective meaningfulness.1
Now, whoever subscribes to the latter position does not yet require any detailed insight into exactly how subjective experiences are to be apprehended. Nor is it necessary to maintain that this explaining depends, exclusively or at least primarily, on scientific methods, nor that it requires any specific knowledge in particular—for instance, knowledge about the neural network of the human brain and the functions assigned to its different regions. Thus, nothing forces the second position into a reductionist scientism; at the same time, nothing forces it to hold the sciences in contempt either.
Our discussion regarding the explainability of experience is therefore different from the debate, currently underway among theorists of consciousness, as to whether consciousness lends itself to a strictly scientific explanation and whether or not it is reducible to physical facts in a wide sense.2 What the proponents of such a scientistic approach advocate exceeds the mere assumption that experience is explainable in that they favor certain types of explanation while excluding others—for instance, narrative accounts. On the other hand, some of the theorists of consciousness who argue in an anti-scientistic vein would surely
1. Thus, my argument is not informed by the opposition of explanation vs. understanding (Erklären vs. Verstehen), which often comes up in discussions about the difference between the humanities and the natural sciences. For information about this debate, see, e.g., Von Wright 1971; Essler 1975; Patzig 1980; and Riedel 1978. As will be shown numerous times, Spinoza’s realistic rationalism is not aligned with this discussion. See also Part IV, Chapter 14, § e.
2. Those arguing for the scientific explainability of consciousness include, from a neurophysiological standpoint, Crick and Koch 1997; Damasio 1994, 1999, 2003; from a philosophical standpoint, Dennett 1991; Dretske 1995; Tye 1995; Pauen 1999. Rosenthal 1991 also affirms that consciousness is explainable, albeit without subscribing to any kind of materialism. Among those opposing the scientific explainability of consciousness are, above all, Kripke 1980; Nagel 1974, 1986; McGinn 1991; Jackson 2004; Levine 2004. The number of publications generated by this discussion has by now become overwhelming.
admit that subjective experience can be accounted for in some way or another, even if it cannot necessarily be explained with the instruments of the exact natural sciences.3
Affirming that experience is explainable does not entail that phenomena of consciousness must supervene on, let alone be reducible to, physical entities. The intuition we are dealing with here is both more ambitious and less ambitious than that. If we want to consider experience to be explainable, we must be able to justify the following assumption: provided we know all the factors that influence someone’s experience directly or indirectly, we must be able (so the assumption goes) to comprehend another person’s affective state arising at the occasion of a certain event, without thereby necessarily creating the same affective state in ourselves. This assumption is less ambitious than some materialistic scenarios in that it refrains from implying that there must always exist a purely scientific explanation for our way of experiencing things. At the same time, however, it is more ambitious in that any successful explanation of experience requires a lot of background knowledge. To explain the experience of anguish following the sudden death of a friend, for instance, we have to know not only about the relationship the person had to that friend but also about such things as the situation he was in when he received the message, his prior experiences with cases of fatality, how he thinks about death in general, etc.
Whether a philosophical position of this kind—let us refer to it as realistic rationalism is justified largely depends on three conditions. First and foremost, a realistic rationalism must be able to make plausible that everything that is or that happens can in principle be grasped or comprehended— that every being is, to use a traditional term, intelligible. The rationalism that will be the subject of the following discussion therefore has an ontological, rather than an epistemological, foundation; it proceeds neither from positing innate ideas4 nor from deriving all possible knowledge from simple and intuitively cognizable ideas but from the general assumption that all being is fully intelligible.
Second, in order to justify the thesis that experience is explainable, one must make sure that what we seek to understand does not coincide with the act of understanding it but that its existence is ontologically prior to its being understood
3. Chalmers 1996, for instance, makes this conception the basis for his theory of consciousness. 4. That the notion of innate ideas doesn’t play a big role in my reconstruction is among the most important differences between my reconstruction of Spinoza’s theory of the human mind and the one proposed by Marshall 2013. (Note added to the English translation.)
or known. With regard to experience, that means that experiencing is prior to its being explained.5 If (and only if) that is the case, experience is not only explainable but also, at the same time, conceivable in its difference from its explanation. And only in that case does rationalism avoid lapsing into absolute idealism—and it is this that justifies its claim to be a realistic rationalism.
These two conditions give rise to a third, a methodical condition, as it were, that must be met by the realistic rationalism outlined above. It must be possible, in principle, to secure the intelligibility of human experience within the concepts already employed in our attempt to grasp beings as beings with metaphysical intent. Only then is the full intelligibility of all being compatible with realism.
As will be shown later on, this position corresponds rather precisely to the approach developed by Spinoza in the first few propositions of the second part of the Ethics and thus at the very outset of his philosophy of mind.6 In my opinion, his rationalism is a realistic rationalism—and not, as many commentators assume or read into him, an idealistic one.7 However, this is not yet the time for a precise characterization of Spinoza’s rationalism; instead, we should inquire into the reasons that might compel us to grant this kind of position priority over its many conceivable alternatives—for instance, that the notion of experience is itself considered a fundamental concept in the philosophy of mind or that any conceptual difference is abandoned, either between experiencing and comprehending or between being and knowing.
This kind of realistic rationalism is chiefly supported by a conviction on which our everyday conception of knowledge is implicitly based. The conviction is that knowledge refers to something else, something whose origin is not itself knowledge. I consider this conviction indispensable because it illuminates better than anything else what drives us, in the end, whenever we want to know
5. This does not rule out that current experiences can be shaped by earlier explanations, nor that our current notions are capable of defining our future experiences. In this context, see Part IV, Chapter 13, § b, as well as Chapter 14, § b.
6. See Part I, Chapter 3.
7. Among those who construe Spinoza’s rationalism as a—potentially absolute—form of idealism are Gueroult 1968; Della Rocca 2002, 2003a; see also Della Rocca 2005 for argumentative background. Deleuze 1992 also moves in that direction. From these kinds of idealistic interpretations, which conceive of Spinoza’s approach as a closed system of concepts lacking external referents, we must distinguish reconstructions that tend to see transcendental arguments at work in the Ethics. Such is the case in Della Rocca 2011, for example. In contrast to the interpretation advanced in Della Rocca 2003a and 2005, his reconstruction from 2011 is compatible with my reading here.
something. Our objective, so to speak, is to somehow relate our thought to something external to thought.8 On the other hand, this conviction has little to say about how we generate knowledge in specific cases. That is why it is generally compatible with different modelings of the process of understanding. Thus, this conviction has to be taken into account only when it comes to the conceptual question of what knowledge actually is; if we want to explain how knowledge is acquired, it is irrelevant. It is perfectly possible to retain this conviction without advocating a naive realism, which assumes that things are just like we see them. On the other hand, an approach of this kind is perfectly capable of describing the cognitive activities at play in any effort of the understanding as a constructive process. Doing so would by no means imply that the realistic claim—that we are actually referring to something real—would have to be rejected (as epistemological constructivists would have it).9 Anyone who maintains that the intended object of knowledge is something real—something external to knowledge—does not therefore have to assume that that which knowledge refers to as its object is immediately given. Thus, the conviction mentioned above merely indicates a necessary condition for a meaningful philosophical definition of the concept of knowledge; what it does not do is form the basis for explaining the procedure by which we acquire knowledge.
Knowledge somehow relates to something external to thought—this conviction strongly supports the second of the two aforementioned premises on which any realistic rationalism is based, namely that in distinguishing between being and knowledge, being must be given primacy. In fact, the idea that knowledge refers to something external to itself only makes sense if we insist both on this distinction and on the primacy of being over knowing.
Yet, there are interpretations of Spinoza—especially among those who read him as a radical rationalist—that deny any such distinction between being and knowledge. Michael Della Rocca, for instance, in his interpretation of the Ethics, argues that a radical rationalism must make existence and intelligibility identical.10 It remains to be seen which kind of rationalism is better attuned to
8. The aforementioned conviction has been formulated with classic precision by Kant, in the context of his limitation of all possible speculative rational knowledge to objects of experience; see the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, B XXVI (1956).
9. This is why the conception of knowledge outlined above is actually compatible with a number of philosophical positions that at first glance seem to be committed to contrary positions—for instance, as mentioned above, certain forms of constructivism. Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbols can serve as a good example for an epistemology that combines a realistic conception of knowledge with the ultimately idealistic assumption that the processes by which knowledge is acquired are, in fact, constructive activities.
10. Della Rocca 2003a, 82–3.
Spinoza’s—Della Rocca’s idealistic variant or my own realistic version. My aim, in this book, is merely to lend plausibility to my realistic approach by questioning the counterintuitive identification of existence and intelligibility. Della Rocca’s line of argument is mostly based on a twofold use of the principle of sufficient reason. In his opinion, this principle not only demands a sufficient explanation for the way things are; it also requires that states of affairs awaiting explanation be ontologically reduced to their intelligibility. He further maintains that this affects not only explanations of cause and effect but also explanations of existence—and not only the existence of Spinoza’s God but also the existence of finite things. According to Della Rocca, a fully consistent rationalism does not merely postulate that the existence of all things is intelligible; it also postulates that the existence of anything consists in its being intelligible. Thus, it no longer distinguishes between a thing’s intelligibility and the instantiation of its existence.
This, however, does not untie the Gordian knot; it merely cuts it. This is because the second use of the principle of sufficient reason—the one that postulates ontological reducibility—surreptitiously delegitimizes the very problem that such a reduction is meant to solve in the first place. If the fact that a thing exists collapses with its being intelligible—that is to say, if there is no difference between intelligibility and the instantiation of existence—then it becomes impossible to comprehend why the being of things can be perceived as something that needs to be explained in the first place. But that runs counter to the fact that very many things allow us to ask why they exist. Ontologically reducing the existence of things to their being intelligible does not answer the question of their being or non-being; it merely eliminates it. Thus, a rationalism that identifies existence with intelligibility deprives itself of its own motivation.
In contrast to Della Rocca, I therefore consider it imperative to retain the difference between intelligibility and existence—and, by extension, the metaphysical primacy of being over knowing. Doing so does not in any way curtail the power of explanatory statements. I can easily label the existence of Jupiter’s moons as intelligible without having to maintain that their existence consists in their being intelligible. Such a primacy of being over knowing merely stipulates how we are to think about intelligibility. Much like the intuitive conception of knowledge outlined above, intelligibility consists in something’s being able to be understood, while not itself being an act of understanding. That is, understanding bottoms out in something beyond understanding. At this point, it is not yet clear how such a primacy is to be defined in detail; what is clear, however, is that it makes sense for a rationalist to assume that such a primacy exists.
Thus, the realistic rationalism outlined above is well prepared to answer to the objections raised by the proponents of idealistic rationalism. Next, we should address the opposite question, why this kind of realistic rationalism should also
be considered superior to an approach that conceives of subjective experience as a fundamental concept in the philosophy of mind. As indicated above, this decision is informed by yet another reference to everyday experience, namely that it is possible, at least in principle, to gain access to other subjects’ experiences without having those experiences ourselves.
It is hard to deny that this is indeed an intuition we have. Many of our social and cultural practices are based on it—from the simple query “how are you?” to practices of psychological counseling and therapy to reading novels. Yet, it is debatable whether we can actually rely on this intuition in the case that concerns us here. Have I not admitted myself, in extrapolating from the example above, that it is one thing to try to comprehend (someone else’s) experiences and another thing altogether to have them oneself? Would it not be necessary, then, for the sake of consistency, to stipulate a categorical difference between subjective experience, on the one hand, and explaining/ understanding, on the other?
Naturally, there is a significant difference between having an experience and explaining it. To experience something physically creates a different perspective from approaching it “only” theoretically. In philosophical discussions, this difference is often metaphorically accounted for by distinguishing between firstand third-person perspectives. In some sense, this difference cannot be overcome because it is based on different ways of participating (or not participating) in events. The question of what consequences this difference has for our topic (the explainability of experience) arises.
In and by itself, recognizing the difference between various ways to participate in an event poses no difficulties for the realistic rationalism proposed by this study. On the contrary, to assume such a difference is quite in agreement with the realistic premises discussed above. However, in certain cases this difference can be so profound as to create a gulf between someone having an experience and someone trying to grasp or explain that very experience—so that people simply cannot understand each other anymore. In light of this potential danger, we may ask ourselves whether the difference between the first and the third person may not, after all, have a greater impact on the question of whether experience is explainable. Must we not assume that this difference strictly precludes the explainability of subjective experience?
That strikes me as questionable. Let us assume that experience and explanation are two different, mutually irreducible processes and that we therefore have to distinguish between the perspective of the first person and the perspective of the third person. This does not imply that descriptions of experiences, as they are produced by subjects from the first-person perspective, cannot be made congruent with descriptions of those very same experiences from the third-person
perspective. On the contrary, if we were to infer such a fundamental epistemic limitation from this difference in perspective, we would also indirectly deny the existence of a common language, shared by someone wanting to express her experiences and someone seeking to comprehend what the other person has experienced. In other words, we would have to maintain that there exists a categorical difference between concepts belonging to the first-person perspective and concepts belonging to the third-person perspective. This claim, however, becomes problematic as soon as we examine its implications a little more closely. Not only does it categorically rule out any reflection about one’s own experiences from a neutral point of view—and thus, the possibility of rationalizing one’s own mental states—but it also calls into question any rational communication about one’s own, or another’s, experiences.
But it is something else that strikes me as even more important here. Let us examine the assumption that there exists an insurmountable difference between the first- and the third-person perspectives and that this is the case not only with respect to actual involvement in certain events but also with respect to the concepts used in the description. In my opinion, such an assumption derives from conflating the principal problem of the explainability of experience with the specific impression that emerges when human beings have trouble comprehending their diverging views of things. To be sure, we all know situations in which we have had that impression. But the question arises as to what we are to make of that impression—probably not that the other person does not know what experience is or that she is not aware that having an experience and explaining one are different things. At the utmost, we can conclude that the other person has not grasped which experience we have had in this case.
If we take this idea seriously, we have to assume that the difference between the first and the third person—and that between the first and the second person— does not affect the philosophical question of whether experience is explainable per se but merely the explanation of particular experiences. In this more limited regard, however, the difference between two perspectives does not have to result in the impression that we are dealing with an unbridgeable gap. On the contrary, we can also conceive of explanations as gradually approaching the perspective of the experiencing subject from a third- or second-person perspective. In ordinary life, we frequently assume the possibility of such gradual approximation, for instance, when we say about someone that she had grasped quite accurately what had happened to us in a certain situation or when we say, after an effort to clear the air following a hurtful argument with a friend, “Well, had I known that, then I would have better understood why you were so offended by my remark.” We apparently assume that others can grasp our experiences more or less accurately and that their explanations can be more or less approximate to the actual state of
affairs. Obviously, there exists a whole spectrum of possibilities between the extreme cases of not being able to understand something at all and understanding it completely.
That raises the following question: could we not just as well conceive of the difference between the first and the third person in terms of a relative epistemic proximity and distance between differing points of view, instead of assuming a categorical distinction? Such an approach would have the advantage that the struggle to explain our own experience would be based on the same theoretical foundation as the problem of explaining somebody else’s experience or even experiences that strike us as wholly unfamiliar. Both phenomena—the reflexive distance we adopt toward ourselves when we seek to better understand our own experiences and the historical, cultural, natural, or biographical difference of backgrounds we are confronted with when we try to explain the experience of other subjects—can be reconstructed in terms of a relative proximity and distance between points of view. In both cases we can more or less approximate the actual state of affairs, and in both cases how close we get depends on the concrete premises from which we proceed.
Considered in this light, the difference between first-person experiencing and third-person explaining no longer constitutes a fundamental objection to the explainability of experience. We can accept this difference as a fact and nonetheless stop short of concluding that it carries such heavy categorical weight as to require two different conceptual systems, as it were. On the contrary, to draw such a conclusion would significantly disavow our everyday practice, for the difference between the first- and the third-person perspectives obviously does not lead us to stop communicating about personal experiences altogether, which confirms the assumption that we are dealing with an issue of relative proximity and distance between points of view. And even if we must painfully notice, again and again, that this kind of communication often does not succeed, then factual difficulties are to blame, rather than a fundamental problem.
Another objection could be raised here. Within the framework of the outlined approach, how are we to account for those qualitative aspects of experience that can only be known if one has experienced them oneself? In my view, even a question such as “What’s it like to be x?”—frequently evoked in the debate about qualia—can be analyzed as an issue of relative proximity and distance.11 While that does not fully solve the problem surrounding qualia, it dramatically reduces its significance. The extent to which it is possible for us to grasp qualitative aspects of experiences is at least also a question of the premises available
11. Loci classici are Nagel 1974 and Jackson 2004. For the connection between Nagel’s bat example and Spinoza, see also Renz 2009c.
to us. For instance, if we want to grasp what it is like for someone to have his wisdom teeth pulled out, then the irreducibly qualitative aspect of mere pain sensation appears more like a marginal phenomenon, all but paling in comparison with other aspects. Thus, let us imagine someone who knows a great deal about the physiology of toothaches, who is familiar with the symbolic and cultural–historical significance of the act of tooth-pulling (Thomas Buddenbrook died from a tooth extraction, after all), someone who, furthermore, is acquainted with the person suffering from toothache, having previously witnessed her reaction to physical pain in general—would someone like that not have a better idea of what it’s like to be that person with a toothache than would someone insisting on having experienced the qualia of a toothache himself?
Something similar could be said about bat experiences, which in turn are not altogether different from experiences had by people from other cultures or other historical periods. It is just as unlikely for us to fully understand how Spinoza must have felt when he fled Amsterdam following an assassination attempt as it is unlikely for us to know precisely what it’s like to be a bat or how a fattened pig must feel when led to the slaughter, panicking over the smell of blood. In all these cases, we are prevented from genuinely reliving another subject’s experiences. Even if we wanted to, we simply cannot have those same experiences. And yet it is possible, in all these cases, to access these experiences on a conceptual level. Any feeling person willing to acquire the appropriate physical, biological, historical, and biographical knowledge will be perfectly able to gain a theoretical understanding of what it’s like to use ultrasonic waves to orient oneself in space or how Spinoza must have felt escaping from Amsterdam. In both cases, we are prevented from having the experience ourselves, on account of either temporal distance or biological differences. That does not, however, contradict our assumption that phenomena such as these can be explained.
All these remarks have significant consequences for the conception of the human mind—which, even though it may not be the exclusive subject of experience, is frequently considered to be what lends meaning to an event, thus constituting an experience for us. I can only provide a few hints here. Let us assume that the problem raised by the difference between the first and the third person does not pertain to the explainability of experience per se but only to the explainability of specific experiences. If that is the case, then it does not make much sense to regard being-a-subject as the defining characteristic of the mind and such; rather, it is only a condition for instantiating individual minds. This does not mean that the question of how a subject of experience is constituted is any less important. On the contrary, the conditions for the instantiation of individual minds determine what it is that separates us into numerically different subjects, despite our ability to explain experiences supraindividually. However,
