Abstract
Descartes, Hume and Kant all emphasized knowledge of self, holding it to be the “Archimedes point” of knowledge, the “capital or centre” of science and the “supreme principle” of employment of the understanding, respectively. Their analyses of what the self is, however, conflict strongly. Descartes held it to be single, simple, unimaginable and continuing. Hume argued we have no experience of anything corresponding to this idea. Kant supported Descartes by arguing that self as single, simple, unimaginable and continuing is absolutely necessary. But, strengthening Hume, he also argued that this idea of self is necessarily vacuous. For to accompany every possible experience, the self would have to be devoid of empirical properties of its own. And such a qualityless “pure consciousness” cannot even be coherently conceived, much less experienced. The topic remains problematic for Western philosophy.
Eastern traditions, by contrast, argue that while experience of “pure consciousness” cannot properly be imagined, it can actually be had. Meditation procedures can allow all ordinary mental activity to settle down and disappear, while one nevertheless remains awake. What remains is consciousness itself, devoid of empirical properties. This experience uniquely allows major features of Descartes, Hume and Kant’s analyses of self to be rendered consistent. And their analyses in turn identify the experience as being of self.
Empirical research appears to support this conclusion. Physiological correlates indicate that the experience reflects an innate potential of human consciousness, and link it to the brain’s default mode network thought to underlie our natural sense of self.
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Notes
- 1.
Young people, especially in affluent societies, often spend considerable time fantasizing about what kind of person they would like to be and imagine and try out various types of personalities. This in itself shows there is a basic notion of self felt to be independent of the imagined personalities. For what is wanted is not the mere existence of the imagined personalities but that the person doing the fantasizing, who already exists, should have them and enjoy them for himself or herself.
- 2.
This is Descartes’ famous “cogito ergo sum”. While Descartes’ “cogito” used to be translated as “I think”, Descartes himself made it clear that he intended us to understand the term to indicate what we now call “being conscious”, rather than merely “thinking”, including such things as willing, sensing and imagining in addition to various types of thinking. Compare, for example, Anscombe and Geach’s now widely used translation of the Meditations in their Descartes: Philosophical Writings (1971) and their “Translators’ Note” (1971: xlvii–xlviii).
- 3.
Compare Descartes’ own “Replies to Objections” and “Letters”, quoted in Descartes: Philosophical Writings, Appendix I (Anscombe and Geach 1971: 299–301).
- 4.
“For my part, I must plead the privilege of a skeptic, and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding” (Hume 1978: 636).
- 5.
Thus, for example, consider an experience of a hand with all five fingers visible. That experience would not exist if no one saw all five fingers together, even if all the fingers were seen by several people separately.
- 6.
“Empirical” qualities, technically understood, have to be able to be either present or absent in experiences. Otherwise they would not be capable of specifying anything within the field of experience, and their presence or absence would not make any empirical difference.
- 7.
Another way of seeing this is to note that if the self did have some quality, it would have to pervade all of one’s experience and as such would not be an “empirical quality” or “special designation” capable of distinguishing between them.
- 8.
We should note, in light of the next section below, that Kant did not argue that this was a logical impossibility but only that, given our actual modes of awareness, we human beings “cannot form the least conception” of how any being might be able to do this (Kant 1964: 157).
- 9.
The closest thing to this experience that can be imagined appears to be completely empty space. Imagining pure, empty consciousness in this way is useful insofar as it illustrates experience devoid of all phenomenological objects (sense objects, sensations, thoughts, etc.). But this image actually represents another experience related to but distinctly different from that of pure, empty consciousness itself. If the ordinary contents of awareness happen to fade away in meditation slowly enough as one settles towards pure, contentless consciousness, one may notice having an experience of being nothing but a bare “point of view” surrounded by empty phenomenological “space”. This experience (often referred to as “pure individuality” or “ego”) is like the deeper experience of consciousness devoid of all content insofar as it, too, is devoid of all perceptual objects (colours, sounds, thoughts, etc.). But it is important to remember that this second experience is really quite different from the first. For, as abstract as it is, it still contains both the “I-it” observer-observed structure and the (albeit empty) perceptual “space” (or “phenomenological manifold”) in which objects of awareness ordinarily appear. And it is only when both this perceptual “space” and the observer’s “point of view” disappear as one settles deeper into contentless awareness that the nature of what was at the “centre” of the “point of view,” consciousness itself, emerges with full clarity. With this caveat in mind, the image of a bare awareness in empty perceptual space can help illustrate relationships between consciousness by itself and our more ordinary experiences (e.g. Ibn Sina’s famous “Flying Man” simile).
- 10.
This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that sufficient familiarity with pure consciousness in meditation reportedly leads to its becoming noticeable throughout daily life along with our more ordinary experiences, as common sense suggests self ought to be.
- 11.
- 12.
For example, some a priori-oriented philosophers have insisted that all experience in principle has to have “I-it” structure and objective phenomenological content. Other, more empirically oriented philosophers responded that this claim about the structure of experience is in fact an empirical claim and as such is subject to empirical falsification, precisely the falsification that pure consciousness experiences of the sort described would in principle provide. (For questions of how seriously we should take reports of the experience, see Sect. 4.6 below.) A second, common a priori argument insisted that every experience we can have has to contain and be structured by culture-dependent elements such as language and other symbols. So experiences of “pure consciousness” gained in the context of different cultures and traditions would in principle have to be different from each other, and discussion of “the” experience is at once misguided. This argument, too, would be falsified by any experience properly identified as “pure consciousness” within any culture whatsoever, since its defining characteristic is the absence of content in general, including in particular such things as beliefs, language and other symbols, a point explicitly emphasized by different meditation traditions all over the world (cf., e.g. Shear 1990b).
- 13.
It should be emphasized that this conclusion is purely phenomenological. Nothing ontological is intended here. The relationship of pure consciousness experiences to ontological issues is complex and far from transparent, as the long-standing debates between Eastern traditions that agree on the existence of the experience make quite clear. The analyses above are accordingly intended to be compatible with a wide variety of ontological stances, including, but not confined to, those of Descartes, Hume, Kant and the Eastern traditions referred to.
- 14.
We can note, for example, that the experience falsifies Kant’s claim that such an experience can never be had. Memories of the experience falsify Hume’s related conjecture that there would be no way to differentiate such an experience from non-existence (Hume 1978: 252). This and other related experiences also suggest the importance of taking seriously Descartes’ claims that his text often reflected his own meditative experiences when trying to understand his texts. (For more on this, cf. Shear 1990a.)
- 15.
This correlation is so natural and robust that it appears even when techniques producing the experience are extremely different and even directly opposed, as (to cite the techniques most associated with the experience in the West) the effortless, concentration-eschewing, α-associated use of mantras in TM and the intensely concentrative, γ-associated and α-blocking concentration of Zen koan work. See Shear (2011).
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Shear, J. (2014). Converging on the Self: Western Philosophy, Eastern Meditation and Scientific Research. In: Menon, S., Sinha, A., Sreekantan, B. (eds) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1587-5_4
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