Tag Archives: Perception

Is Flesh an Organ or Medium? “Touch Experiments” in Aristotle

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Aristotle takes a curious position on whether the sense of touch involves a medium.  It seems easier, simpler, and more intuitive to believe that there is no medium, and that the sense of touch works by having the sense object affect the flesh directly.  However, Aristotle imagines several thought experiments, which serve as arguments to bolster his position, all of which are clever, but which have been found wanting by some commentators. (1)  These arguments are laid out in De Anima II.11, the chapter which particularly explores and describes the sense of touch. 

The first of these arguments is the “Membrane Argument.”  We are told by Aristotle to imagine a membrane, stretched as an extremely thin layer around our body, or perhaps limited, for clarity, to only around a hand.  In such a situation, the membrane, “would communicate the sensation in the same way, immediately when touched”  (trans. Shields, 423a3-4).  We would not, Aristotle insists, think that the membrane was an organ, even though there was an immediate transmission of the perception.  So, just as an immediate communication does not suffice to make an organ out of a membrane, so too immediate communication of the perception in the case of the flesh does not make it an organ either. 

There is a modification of this argument, acknowledging the possible objection that the membrane example is rigged in favor of Aristotle’s conclusion: a membrane is not living, and so this example is doomed to failure from the outset, because all organs are necessarily living.  Coming immediately on the heels of the membrane argument, then, Aristotle offers up the “Natural Membrane Argument.”  The idea here is to imagine, however this would come about, that the membrane from the first example is now “naturally attached” (symphues) to the skin, rather than an artificial add-on.  Aristotle says that in this scenario, “the perception would pass through it still more quickly” (Trans. Shields, 423a5).  It is unclear how perception would occur more quickly than the instantaneity implied in the case of the mere membrane, but that it occurs, seems for Aristotle to result from the idea that some things, namely naturally affixed ones, are better media than others. 

Continuing on with this same line of thought, Aristotle next fleshes out his naturally attached argument by inventively offering air as that thing to which we become naturally affixed.  Supposing that were air to become naturally affixed to us, we would then think that sound, smell and sight were brought about by one thing, namely the air as our single organ (since they, of course, operate via air).  We would nevertheless be mistaken, as the organs would properly be the ears, eyes and nose.  So just as in the hypothetical case of air becoming naturally affixed to us, with air as a medium which appears to us as an organ, so too in reality in the case of flesh, where flesh is actually a medium but also falsely appears to us as an organ.  One important feature to pick up on here is that it is not the relative proximity of the object of perception that determines whether a medium is mistaken for an organ, but it is rather how indistinguishable the medium is from the sense faculty itself, in other words, how closely aligned the medium and faculty are.  This may in fact be only hard to distinguish because of our point of view, in that the sense of touch is in some way internal to flesh, and thus difficult to experientially separate from the medium of flesh.  In the same way that in the example of air becoming naturally fused to our flesh we would have difficulty in determining whether, for example, the air was the medium or the organ of hearing (when it fact the ear was the organ all along,) so it is the case now when we are with great difficulty trying to determine the difference between the medium and organ when it comes to flesh in the case of touch. 

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(1) In fact many consider these arguments poor.  But I do think, along with Polansky, that these arguments were attempting to make room for “the possibility for the flesh to be medium rather than sense organ”  (Polanksy 2007: 325)

Aristotle, and Christopher Shields. Aristotle De Anima. Trans. Christopher Shields. Oxford Univ Press, 2016.

Polansky, Ronald. 2007. Aristotle’s De anima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Dynamics of Thought: “The Soul is All Things”

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(This post assumes that thought or perception is self-cognizant, that is, that to have a perception or thought is to be aware of it, as a function of the perception or thought itself, and that awareness does not owe to some capacity over and above perception or thought itself.  See this post for Aristotle’s position.)

As an addendum to the idea that awareness is concomitant with all thought insofar as as it is thought, it is important to discuss the overall flexibility of the soul as a capacity par excellence. In contrast to some readings of the Platonic account which has all knowledge somehow latent within us in Recollection, the Aristotelian account maintains that thought is something entirely plastic and receptive to its objects. This is the case to such a degree that Aristotle can make the seemingly shocking statement that, “Let us now summarize our results about soul, and repeat that the soul is in a way all existing things” (De Anima 431b21, trans. Smith). This may in fact be the explanation for why Aristotle does not need to appeal to some feature over and above the mere presence of a thought to account for an awareness of that thought. For if the soul were not an all-accommodating capacity, a potentiality, then this would mean it would have only a capacity determinate for certain thoughts; it could only have an awareness of those objects for which it was a determinate capacity. This would entail that if the soul were to meet anything outside the confines of its proscribed capacity, it would not be aware of them.  Yet this is absurd; anything we think of, we are aware of. Therefore, if we want to preserve the feature of psychology that thought brings with it an awareness of itself, we would do well by also maintaining, with Aristotle, that the “soul is all things.”

Does Perceiving Require a Perception of a Perception?

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Since we perceive that we are seeing and hearing, it is necessary that one perceives that one sees either by sight or by some other sense…Further, if the sense which perceived sight were to be other than sight, then either this will carry on into infinity or there will be some sense which will be of itself, with the result that one should grant this in the case of the first sense (De Anima, 425b22 ff., trans. Shields).

In the De Anima passage above Aristotle tells us that there are no perceptions of perceptions, that is, a perception as such does not need to appeal to yet another perception to explain our awareness of it.  Rather the capacity of perception itself, when active, carries with it the awareness of its own perception.  Aristotle’s main problem with multiplying perceptions here is that this will lead to perceptions of perceptions of perceptions, a never-ending cascade of perceptual regress, if you will. 

There would seem to be at least two other difficulties Aristotle would wish to avoid with “perceptions of perception.”(1)  The first is that the second perception would not be “of” the object of perception, the purported intention of the thought.  Rather it would be of the first perception (even if this included the original object as well), relegating the first perception to a role not unlike the one played by the Forms in Plato’s epistemology.  That is, the first perception would be the noetic stuff given to the awareness, just as the Forms are ultimately that by which and of which a thought is about.  On this understanding the first perception would be of the object, while the second perception would be of the perception of the object.  Consciousness is thus directly removed from the true object of its intention, and there is an awareness not of something out there in the world, but at a remove of one step from that world.  If this is so, it is easy to see why Aristotle would avoid this difficulty by positing that a perception, or a thought, carries with it its own awareness. 

The second difficulty for “perceptions of perception” is that the two perceptions are presumably identical.  And either they are precisely identical, in which case one of them is superfluous, or they differ only in that the second is the perception of the first, while the first is of some other object.  In this second case then, the second perception perceives the first perception with the result that there is an awareness of either the first perception or the object of the first perception, it is unclear to say which.  Whichever the object of the second perception though, it would seem better served, since we have already granted that a perception qua mere perception (in the second perception) has the capacity to serve as an awareness, that we grant this same power to the first perception, eliminating what appears to be an unneeded appeal to the unsure grounds of infinite regress.

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(1)
This impulse to put “safeguards” in place for capacities seems to be a mainstay in philosophy: for every capacity there must be some further capacity over and above this one in order to ensure proper functioning of the capacity.  John McDowell criticizes this maneuver lucidly when he says, “Some people have a capacity to throw a basketball through the hoop from the free-throw line. Any instantiation of such a capacity is imperfect; even the best players do not make all their free throws” (McDowell 245).  Thus, to make a basket with (a given) regularity belongs to the capacity itself, not by a capacity over and above the ability to hit a free throw.

Aristotle, and Christopher Shields. De Anima. Trans. Christopher Shields.  Oxford: Clarendon, 2016.

McDowell, John (2010), ‘Tyler Burge on disjunctivism’, Philosophical Explorations, 13: 3, 243-255