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The greatest French philosopher René Descartes of the 17thCentury, so wonderfully superior to his merely literary French successors today, set out to escape doubt and find certainties. From the simple premise that he was thinking something, whatever it was, even if it was false, he argued to what he took to be the certain first conclusion that he existed. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I exist. But there is a problem. As the physicist Georg Lichtenberg said, Descartes seems to be going further in his first conclusion than he really could. All he could conclude with certainty from his thinking something was not that he existed, but that there was thinking going on. I agree with that myself. Don't you?
Not that it leaves us without another problem, a great problem. What is thinking? What is it for someone or something to think? A little more widely, what is what you can call cognitive consciousness? There are also, you may be ready to agree, two other kinds of consciousness or sides or groups of elements of consciousness. One is consciousness in seeing something or in any other kind of perception, say hearing. Call that perceptual consciousness. The third consciousness has to do with wanting or desiring things, and what goes along with that, say intending to get things. Call that affective consciousness. What are each of these three sorts of consciousness?
And there is also the all-inclusive question of the nature of consciousness in general. What is it? What is the common factor or character of the three sorts?
Most past and present philosophy concerned with consciousness deals with or tries to deal only with this general or levelling question, not its three parts. But you might wonder, as a first tentative impulse about all this, whether that is right. Isn't there a lot of difference, maybe fundamental, between seeing and thinking, and between seeing and wanting? Can a single general or levelling answer be useful? Be right? Could it be that the general question has to be answered adequately, so to speak, in terms of different answers to the three particular questions?
Isn't there a pretty good additional reason for...