Norman Kemp Smith

“ The subject-matter of inquiry remains, however, objective throughout: all we have to do with is, on the one hand, the causal relation of objects to one another and to the nervous system, and on the other the functional relation of states of the nervous system to the complete experience which includes this whole spatial environment with all its causal relations within itself. Throughout we are dealing with reality, and with a reality in which there appears no dualism, and therefore no insoluble problems. ”

“ Throughout the Kritik, and indeed in all cases in which he is not directly engaged in defending his monistic view of experience, he practically equates the self with the brain. As the brain is an agent that reacts upon its environment and yet at the same time is an object existing in space, it very conveniently combines his two conflicting views of the self—as subject or character when it is felt as active and as self or content when it is experienced as object. ”

“ The world thus experienced is apprehended as having a past that survives itself in thought and a future that anticipates itself in knowledge, and similarly as having spatial limits that may be transcended in imagination and thought. ”

“ It leads us not only to what has not been experienced but to what can never by any possibility be experienced by beings like ourselves. But here again the ambiguities of the term experience come to Avenarius’ rescue. He argues that thought is as genuine a form of experience as sense-perception, and so in the end falls back on the timeworn argument of subjective idealism, that thought and reality are inseparable, because reality can only be conceived in thought, and thought involves the presence of the thinker. ”

“ Though the absolute standpoint states nothing which is not true, and though in experience we apprehend objects as independent of the self, we never experience them save in relation to the self. The absolute standpoint is therefore reached only by abstraction from complete experience. Further, Avenarius refuses to recognise any such thing as the perception of an object. The only reality that can exist is experience, and experience has the two inseparable aspects, inner and outer, psychical and physical, perception and object perceived, thought and object thought about. ”

“ For when he allows as legitimate the demand that experience be ideally completed in thought, he makes an admission which he cannot successfully combine with his assertion that nothing exists save in relation to the self. The ideal completion of given reality which results from the analysis of material bodies into elements which no human senses can apprehend, or from following the earth back to a time when no human being existed upon it, is, strictly, not a completion of experience but only of what is experienced. ”

“ None the less Avenarius maintains as the fundamental principle of his Kritik that the only hope of a scientific treatment of mental experience lies in the development of physiology on the lines which he has sketched. Only through a scientific understanding of the brain in its relation to environment can we acquire knowledge of the ultimate nature of experience as a whole. This part of his philosophy appears to have been formed previous to the views developed in the Menschliche Weltbegriff, and to be uncritically based on the scientific teaching prevalent in his day. ”

“ While the opposition of characters and contents is a distinction between aspects inseparably involved in every single experience, the opposition of self and not-self is a distinction of kindred groups of concrete contents within the field of objective experience. Avenarius’ view of the self is obviously determined by the same naturalistic intention as that of Hume. But while Hume contends that we can know nothing of the ultimate nature of the self, Avenarius seeks to prove that there is nothing in the self which cannot be known by a possible extension of our present experience. ”

“ Avenarius will have nothing to do with the solution offered by subjective idealism—that our experience as purely subjective may vary simultaneously with those brain-states which real external objects have produced. That solution rests on a dualism which Avenarius denounces as ungrounded and absolutely false. Our experienced world is reality, and its functional relation to its own component, the brain, must therefore be reconcilable in some other manner with the equally undoubted causal relations of that brain to the objects external to it. ”

“ By identifying subjectivity with character he is enabled to treat subjectivity as an aspect that colours, quite indifferently, any and every objective content, and therefore as yielding nothing that can constitute the self as a self-centred reacting agent. ”

“ The most, then, we can ever do is simply to describe what we actually find as constituting reality. [18] From the absolute standpoint we describe the object just as it is presented, and from the relative point of view, while considering it as a term in a relation whose other term is the self, we must also still describe it just as it exists for us. ”

“ When it is asserted that an object produces a perception in us, it is assumed that it acts on the sense-organs and brain, and also upon that inner something, soul or consciousness, which introjection adds. What now is meant by ‘acting on’? It covers the conception of physical causation. There is a continuous causal relation between the object and the resulting process in the brain. By acting on the brain it causes that process. This causal relation will not, however, carry us from the brain-state to consciousness. ”

“ Being convinced of the closed nature of the physical world, as obedient in all its changes to the principle of the conservation of energy, he asserts as ascertained fact, that consciousness can neither intervene to modify a brain-process nor emerge from it as its effect. ”

“ By this limiting addition the contradictions involved in the absolute standpoint are removed. So long as the errors of introjection are avoided, this relativism is perfectly unambiguous, and it is also the only possible or consistent attitude. But when misled by a dualistic distinction between the absolute and the relative, between appearance and reality, we ask: What is the object in and for itself?—we raise an unreal, because self-contradictory, problem. ”

“ Work is as necessary as nourishment, activity as indispensable as rest. Through response to stimuli the brain organises more and more complex vital series which by enabling it to maintain itself with greater ease in the given environment release energy for more extended activities. In determining, by general dialectical argument, the various types to which such vital series must conform, Avenarius professes to have sketched the programme of future physiological research. ”

“ Throughout the argument spatial arrangement has been assumed to possess a reality that can be accurately defined and which is known as conditioning the apprehension of colour or shape. Since the nature of the vibrations in ether is recognised as constant while the colour is individual, the former alone supplies the means of determining the nature of the cinnabar as it is in itself. In a similar manner our knowledge of the actual size of an object enables us to neutralise differences of subjective appearance. ”

“ But consideration of this falsifying process of introjection I must defer until I have stated more completely Avenarius’ own view of reality. To illustrate the truth of his assertion that there is nothing which need lead to radical alteration of pure experience, and that all questions which are insoluble from its point of view are problems which involve illegitimate assumptions, Avenarius takes the following crucial instance. [14] Two individuals, one of whom is red-blind, apprehend an object as being numerically the same for both, and name it cinnabar. ”

“ We preserve the simpler attitude so long as it works; when it breaks down we correct its conclusions from the more concrete standpoint. Taking into account the relation of the cinnabar to the self we observe that only when the vibrations caused by it affect the nerve-endings, and thereby the brain, do we perceive the coloured cinnabar. Though all observers apprehend the same cinnabar, each apprehends it in relation to a different self, and therefore, it may be, differently. ”

“ The only possible questions are questions which can be solved by a possible extension of experience. Insoluble problems only arise when the true and natural and primitive attitude is departed from, and such departure is in all cases due to that illegitimate process to which Avenarius has given the name, introjection. ”

“ And, since the content of my assumption is the matter of another individual’s experience, though the hypothesis introduces a duality or plurality, it does not cause a dualism in the philosophical sense. Nothing is assumed which is not or cannot be experienced either by myself or by others.
The proof that the natural consciousness involves no dualism demands, however, a fuller analysis of its various elements. The first distinction which Avenarius notes is that between things and thoughts. ”

“ The third position, while equally untenable, brings the determining assumptions—and they are of course those involved in the process of introjection—more clearly into view. We may, in the first place, note that even if colour is an effect of which ether-vibrations are the cause, that does not justify us in describing it as appearance. An effect is equally real with its cause. Before colour can be described in that way it must be set in opposition to something actual, and that is only possible through introjection. ”

“ The interest and value of the Menschliche Weltbegriff is, however, by no means lessened when we thus recognise its sturdy idealism as being spoken out of the mouth of its convinced opponent. The bankruptcy of materialism is dramatically represented in its whole-hearted welcome of the old gods disguised under strange names. Idealism has found a prophet in the enemy’s camp. Further confirmation of this interpretation of Avenarius’ philosophy will be gained in the next article from an examination of his theory of the introjectionist argument. ”

“ He frees the doctrine from dependence upon any particular set of views as to the constitution and working of the nervous system, and yet brings the two series more closely together than had ever been done on any previous theory. Indeed, just on that account he maintains that his view is not properly describable as parallelism. For, while parallelism implies dualism, the relation which he himself traces between the mental and the physiological series is of the same nature as that which exists between the factors in a mathematical function. ”

“ The analogies which are established between the cerebral and the mental series co-ordinate them in the closest manner, and in their particular nature are fitted to apply throughout the whole range of mental experience. The brain of an individual is, in Avenarius’ technical phraseology, the ‘empiriokritischer Substitutionswert’ of that individual. ”

“ The brain is experienced as independent in the same sense as “material” bodies. [13] Everything, in fact, which is not character is experienced as permanent existence. Avenarius therefore contrasts the dependent characters with the independent vibrations of the nervous system. ”

“ In so doing it sacrifices energy, not for the sake of increasing its resources, but merely in order, as far as possible, to preserve itself unchanged in this hostile environment. Similarly, when the mind meets with facts which conflict with its dominant concepts, it invents Beibegriffe, that is to say, modifies its concepts in such a way as to neutralise the conflict in the simplest possible manner and with the least possible change in its accustomed attitude. ”

“ The concepts, or attitudes of mind, with which the facts of experience conflict are, according to Avenarius, in all cases ultimately due to that process of introjection which has given rise to the animism of primitive man. ”

“ The hypothesis lies in the interpretation which I give to the movements of my fellow-men, in the interpretation that they are expressive, that is, that they are dependent on feeling and will. This hypothetical element can be eliminated. ”