Collingwood and the Problem of Consciousness

Collingwood and the Problem of Consciousness I shall argue in this chapter that, with very little addition or modification, Collingwood has the solution to the contemporary mind-body problem. The version of Collingwood’s metaphysics that I shall here advance is not a qualified and extended version but rather a pared-down version that yet attempts to retain the originality of Collingwood’s position. It was Collingwood’s belief that different forms of knowledge legitimately co-exist because they express different but equally legitimate ways of viewing the same objects. The mind-body problem originates in the refusal to admit this. In the New Leviathan Collingwood summarises his view of the problem as follows: 2.41. ‘The problem of the relation between body and mind’ is a bogus problem which cannot be stated without making a false assumption. 2.42. What is assumed is that man is partly body and partly mind. On this assumption questions arise about the relations between the two parts; and these prove unanswerable. 2.43. For man’s body and man’s mind are not two different things. They are one and the same thing, man himself, as known in two different ways. (Collingwood 1942: 10-11) In developing this position so as to deal with the contemporary mind-body problem, the most obvious difficulty is that the contemporary problem would seem to be very different from that that existed in Collingwood’s day. Most contemporary philosophers would claim, with various reservations and provisos, that we are wholly or fundamentally physical. The problem remains as to how to reconcile our first-person experience of consciousness with this view; but there are now few philosophers who would argue that ‘man is partly body and partly mind’. I shall argue that Collingwood’s view retains its relevance, for the ultimate target of his criticism was not dualism per se but rather the study of pure ‘being’. Collingwood would wish to turn the mind-body debate to a discussion centred on explanation and causation. In order to explain why Collingwood believes that this is a more fruitful area, it will first be necessary to briefly describe his conception of philosophy. Collingwood argues that it is a common error, dating back to Aristotle, to mix and confuse the study of pure being with the attempt to recover the presuppositions of different sciences. But it is only the latter that he is concerned with, for ‘the science of pure being would have a subject-matter, entirely devoid of peculiarities; a subject-matter, therefore, containing nothing to differentiate it from anything else, or from nothing at all’ (Collingwood 1940: 14). He advocates instead ‘metaphysics without ontology’ (Collingwood 1940: 17-20). As thus conceived, metaphysics might be described as a second-order discipline that attempts to discover and to make explicit the conceptual foundations of distinct co-existing forms of inquiry. (Admittedly, many philosophers would hesitate to give this form of metaphysics the title of ‘metaphysics’ at all, but so be it: the important point is that Collingwood makes clear that he thinks it is a mistake to pursue metaphysics in its traditional form.) However, that is not to say that Collingwood is uninterested in his own presuppositions. On the contrary: he argues that philosophy itself, on its own – that is to say, as it looks at itself – has no foundations. He characterises philosophy ‘not by the goals that it has achieved or hopes to achieve but as an activity’ (Collingwood 1933: 3). It is self-reflective activity par excellence, for the question ‘what is philosophy?’ is itself part of philosophy. Indeed, it is the only discipline whose self-reflection is part of itself. And whatever answer is given to that question will immediately launch the philosopher upon an infinite regress. Throughout most of the history of philosophy this regress has been regarded as a regretful characteristic, as though philosophy should rather be a discipline characterised by the goals it has achieved or might achieve. But Collingwood is unperturbed by philosophy’s foundation-less nature. Indeed, he welcomes it. For the very feature of philosophy that makes it unsuited to seek the ultimate nature of ‘reality’ (or ‘pure being’) qualifies it to examine other forms of inquiry. It brings no preconceptions of its own to these inquiries. And it is to these studies of other disciplines that Collingwood gives the term ‘metaphysics without ontology’. (Of course the metaphysician without ontology not only does not presuppose that philosophy is capable of discovering the ultimate nature of reality; the metaphysician without ontology does not presuppose that there is any other discipline that is capable of discovering the ultimate nature of reality.) Collingwood believes that by studying the commonly agreed best examples of, for example, natural science and history – the two fundamentally different ways in which we study ourselves – the metaphysician will be able to work back to their distinctive features and the presuppositions upon which they rely. Ultimately he believes that the metaphysician might discover and make explicit those ‘absolute presuppositions’ that are logically essential to their respective disciplines, presuppositions that may not be explicitly mentioned by the practitioners of those disciplines but which nonetheless impart to them their distinctive characteristics. The discovery of these presuppositions may have a beneficial effect upon the practitioners of those disciplines but this prescriptive element is recessive. The metaphysician does not set out with the intention of telling the natural scientist and the historian ho to do their jobs. There is a circular element to this process, in that the metaphysician starts his or her inquiry with commonly agreed examples of good practice, but it is virtuously circular. The metaphysician’s conclusions can be challenged not just by pointing out non sequiturs in his or her own reasoning but also by pointing to examples of good practice that the metaphysician has not taken into account. The metaphysician without ontology does not attempt to advance before all the other forms of inquiry as, so to say, an advance guard. This is what Collingwood would see many contemporary physicalists as attempting to do – as attempting to advance before physics so as to tell physicists (or, more particularly, neuroscientists) of the dreadful mind-body problem that, somewhere down the road, were it not for their advice, they would inevitably encounter. As will be seen, Collingwood believes that any such warning is unfounded. It should by now be clear that whether or not he is classed as an idealist, Collingwood is certainly not a physicalist. As mentioned in my opening paragraph, the version of Collingwood’s philosophy and metaphysics that I present here is a somewhat pared-down version of Collingwood’s own views. I have purposely presented him as a ‘non-physicalist’ rather than an ‘idealist’, but, admittedly, there are idealist elements within Collingwood’s philosophy. Most notably, he is committed to a version of the ontological argument, an in his correspondence with Ryle he makes clear his commitment to synthetic a priori propositions. However, it is unclear to me ho, in these instances, Collingwood justifies breaking his own advice not to study ‘pure being’. But he is a non-physicalist of an unusual sort: since he does not involve himself in ontology, he does not draw a line in the sand and turn to natural scientists and his fellow-philosophers and proclaim ‘they shall not pass’. Without knowing the basics of Collingwood’s conception of philosophy and metaphysics – as set out above – the reader might well misinterpret Collingwood as himself assuming that ‘man is partly body and partly mind’. The following passage might give this impression. The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of an event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood, on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event. (Collingwood 1946: 213) Here, the terms ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are purely metaphorical. Collingwood does not subscribe to any version of ‘Descartes’ myth’ of privileged access – whereby on the one hand we know our own minds with certainty, though in private; and on the other hand, with less certainty, we know the external world. He is simply arguing that when (as historians) we claim to have understood an action (our own or someone else’s) we are claiming something different to what the natural scientist claims when he or she claims to have understood it. As historians, we would be claiming to have understood the rationale for that action – an understanding of why. Of course, in a sense natural scientists can also understand why, by correlating mental states with brain states, but they do not understand an agent’s rationale qua rationale. In relation to the mind-body problem, the essential point is that the same action might be explained in different non-conflicting ways. They are non-conflicting because they are ultimately based not on this or that component of the explanandum but on the different absolute presuppositions of different disciplines of inquiry. In the case of humans, natural science and history provide two contrasting, but non-conflicting, ways of explaining an action, but we cannot make any a priori pronouncements that it will always be impossible to explain the actions of robots historically (by extrapolating back from their actions to their original premises). If, in the future, we seriously suspect that it might be both possible and informative then the only sensible recourse will simply be to try to do so. That will be the only way to settle the matter. The difference between these two forms of explanation, distinctive of natural science and history is intensional or semantic. It may be a feature of certain classificatory systems used in natural science that classes do not overlap each other, but – without an ontological bias – there are no grounds to import this principle into philosophy and metaphysics. And without this principle, there is no problem of causal over-determination. We have now briefly surveyed Collingwood’s conception of metaphysics and his view of the ‘two different ways’ by which we know ‘one and the same thing, man himself’; but the physicalist might at this point object that this talk of causation and explanation is irrelevant to the problem. Yes, there are two different ways to describe getting a beer from the fridge – as a chain of reasoning (it is uncomfortably hot, a beer is refreshing, I shall get myself a beer) or as a causal chain of physical events; but the relationship between thoughts and brain states remains utterly mysterious. In response to this objection, it will here be argued that our understanding of the relationship between different disciplines of inquiry, and particularly between natural science and history, feeds back to the very heart of the mind-body problem. Collingwood did not claim to have isolated every distinguishing characteristic of natural science and history, but he did claim to have discovered some. One of them is a distinct use of the word ‘cause’. In fact, Collingwood identifies three different senses of ‘cause’, each distinctive of a different field of inquiry. It [‘cause’] has three senses; possibly more; but at any rate three. Sense I. Here that which is ‘caused’ is the free deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it. Sense II. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event in nature, and its ‘cause’ is an event or state of things by producing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be. Sense III. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event or state of things, and its ‘cause’ is another event or state of things standing to it in a one-one relation of causal priority: i.e. a relation of such a kind that (a) if the cause happens or exists the effect also must happen or exist, even if no further conditions are fulfilled, (b) the effect cannot happen or exist unless the cause happens or exists, (c) in some sense which remains to be defined, the cause is prior to the effect; for without such priority there would be no telling which is which. (Collingwood 1940: 285-6) Collingwood identified Sense III as distinctive of natural science, Sense II as distinctive of engineering and Sense I as distinctive of history. Collingwood did not claim that other senses of cause are never to be found in history, but he did claim that Sense I is distinctive of history. The significance of these observations in relation to the mind-body problem is that physicalists tend to only recognise Sense III. If they do recognise another sense of cause, its domain is said to be ‘anomalous’, i.e. in principle reducible to Sense III but not in practice. But note that if, instead of Sense III, Sense I were deemed to be fundamental then, by an argument of the same logical structure, it would be the domain of Sense III that would be left in an anomalous position. The argument would run as follows. P.1 Some mental events interact causally with physical events. P.2 Where there is causality an agent must be afforded a motive. P.3 Physical events cannot be afforded a motive. C.1 Although the distinguishing characteristic of a physical event is that it falls under a general law, nonetheless some physical events can be picked out using intentional vocabulary alone. P.4 Any event that can be picked out using intentional vocabulary is a mental event. C.2 Some physical events are identical with mental events. That is to say, even though physical properties, falling under general laws, remain anomalous, i.e. irreducible to motives afforded to agents (P.3), it may be inferred that they are properties of mental events – properties supervenient upon mental properties. My point is that if we assume that one sense of cause is fundamental we are immediately faced with a version of the mind-body problem, but, without prior ontological commitment, it is unclear why one sense of cause must be thought of as fundamental. At this point the physicalist might object that even if we admit that confusing the relationship between natural science and history might lead to a version of the mind-body problem, nonetheless the contemporary mind-body problem remains unilluminated. The problem is the apparent lack of any connection between our scientific understanding of the physical world and our first-person conscious experience of the physical world. If, for example, I see a red tomato, my conscious first-person experience of the red tomato seems to remain mysteriously disconnected from my scientific understanding of this experience, and this would seem to be the case whatever the level of my scientific expertise. When we study the presuppositions of natural science and history we are simply avoiding the main problem. The trouble with this presentation of the mind-body problem is that from this standpoint it is easy to see the problem as a conflict between natural science and common sense; but common sense, like traditional metaphysics, is itself imbued with ontological commitments that are likely to complicate any analysis. For this reason it is more productive to compare natural science with other disciplines of inquiry. When we do so, as we have seen, different senses of ‘cause’ emerge that are used indiscriminately by common sense. The problem – a purely metaphysical problem – begins when we assume that there is a definable point or region ‘in the real world’ at which one form of explanation must give way to another. Physicalists are right to point out that we have no grounds by which to delimit future discoveries in neuroscience. But it is surely also relevant to the mind-body problem that when the subjects of a scientific experiment report a different motivation for a particular action than the monitoring of their brains would suggest, their reports are not simply disregarded. There would be no point to the experiment if that were the case. It will either be decided that the subject of the experiment was in error or that the scientist’s hypothesis was in error. But on which side the error falls is, in science, never decided a priori. Furthermore, a scientific discovery can become part of the historian’s data and the subject’s report (the rationalisation of his or her perceptions or actions) can become part of the scientist’s data. The boundary between these two different ways of understanding the world is permeable in both directions. Yet they remain conceptually distinct. If the boundary were impermeable then we would be faced with a very odd world, a world of either Cartesian dualism or physicalism, and either way the mind-body problem would strike us as a mystery. But that is not the world we are faced with. Despite the experiential disparity between a first-person experience of the red tomato and a third-person scientific account of this experience, Collingwood’s metaphysics without ontology suggests that they are not about two different things; rather, they are about one and the same thing, the tomato itself, as known in two different ways. It is ontology that tries to force our hand between these two ways of knowing, to say what the tomato really is. Thus it is ontology itself that we should question, before turning to the problem of consciousness. And, finding ontology wanting, we should end the game here.