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Hume and Descartes On Self-Acquaintance
David L. Mouton
Dialogue / Volume 13 / Issue 02 / June 1974, pp 255 - 269
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300025610, Published online: 09 June 2010
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David L. Mouton (1974). Hume and Descartes On Self-Acquaintance.
Dialogue, 13, pp 255-269 doi:10.1017/S0012217300025610
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HUME AND DESCARTES ON
SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
T
HE idea of self-knowledge divides naturally into two parts in
accordance with the distinction between knowledge by acquaint-
ance and knowledge by description. I know myself and I know things
about myself. The latter I know partly from self-acquaintance, partly
from the behavior, especially linguistic, of others, and partly from
each of these. All aspects of self-knowledge are controversial, so I
shall concentrate in this paper on the question of self-acquaintance.
My purpose is both philosophical and historical. It is commonly
believed that Hume and Descartes held diametrically opposed, or
at least strongly contrasting, views regarding self-acquaintance since
Hume is regularly ridiculed for his denial of ability to discover his
own Self whereas it would occur to no one to ascribe that same view
to the author of the Meditations. In this paper I shall argue that
contrary to appearances these two philosophers either held the same
position or Descartes occupied the more agnostic extreme; and also
that the position usually ascribed to Hume is, when properly under-
stood, both correct and of fundamental philosophical significance.
Part of my reason for selecting Hume and Descartes for analysis
and comparison is to show thereby that the thesis of this paper is
true independently of the rationalist/empiricist schism in philosophy.
The knowability of the self is a special case of the knowability of
anything or anyone, and to know or be acquainted with any object
is to know or be acquainted with at least some of its properties.
Consider, then, a thing X with its properties a,b,c,d,. . . n. Suppose
furthermore that X is a mirror. The properties of a mirror fall into
at least two different classes. First, there are those relatively stable
properties such as the weight, size, material, etc. which the mirror
has by virtue of being a physical object. Let us call these "structural
properties." There is another class of properties which includes all
those colors and shapes which the mirror "has" by virtue of its
function in reflecting the visual properties of other objects. Thus
the mirror appears red when its surface is reflecting a red object
255
DAVID L. MOUTON
and green when it is reflecting a green object. I shall refer to these
as "functional properties."
Consider now Hume's famous confession of inability to discover
his own self:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade,
love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without
a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. (T, 252)
1
This falls far short of being a model philosophic statement, being
neither clear nor precise. Of course I cannot scrutinize myself with-
out a perception since Hume held scrutinizing itself to be a percep-
tion. There is however an important claim here which needs to be
sorted out. When I turn my attention on myself, what is the nature
of the object of my attention ? Hume's answer constitutes in part a
denial that he could discover anything which has "perfect identity
and simplicity" and thus continues "invariably the same, thro' the
whole course of our lives." (T, 251) But this is not the whole or
even the central issue since two philosophers could easily agree
about the description of a certain experience without being able to
agree at all with regard to the application of the concept of identity
to it or its objects. Thus Hume also attacks, secondly, the claim of
"some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately
conscious of what we call our Self," (T 251) and part of what
Hume means is exactly rebutted by his observation that "when I
enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on
some particular perception or other. . ." And this is clearly a claim
about the nature of one of our experiences, specifically about the
experience which constitutes the basis of self-acquaintance. Here
is the rock bottom of Hume's position with regard to self-knowledge.
The cutting edge of Hume's claim is the distinction between two
types of possible objects of awareness, one of which he encountered
each time he searched for the other. Hume implies that each is
possible since (a) he in fact tried to discover both types and (b) he
in fact failed to find one of them. Instead of concluding that Hume is
egregiously mistaken and confused, I suggest an alternative inter-
pretation. Hume's implied distinction between two types of objects
1
Numbers given in parentheses preceded by T* refer to pages in Hume's
Treatise, the Oxford edition, (ed.) L. A. Selby-Bigge.
256
HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
of awareness is really the distinction between, on the one hand, an
entity, and, on the other hand, some "objects" of awareness not
constituting either partly or wholly an entity. For he did not deny
the obvious fact that when one indulges in self-scrutiny, one must
thereby be aware of something. But, curiously enough, it is obscure
how such a distinction is to be drawn in the light of Hume's insistence
that we are never aware of anything but perceptions and that every
perception is a substance capable of independent existence. At this
point I suggest the application of the mirror analogy.
A person is not a mirror and a mirror is not conscious. Nor if a
mirror were conscious would it be easy to specify the roles played by
its structural and functional properties. Nevertheless, the analogy can
be helpful. Corresponding to the mirror's functional and structural
properties, there is a current distinction between concepts of conscious
states which can be analysed adverbially and those which cannot be
so analysed. In the former case one is simply aware of something by
means of some property or properties of the conscious state itself, an
experience which necessarily occurs each time a conscious state of
that description is instantiated; in the latter case one is aware of some
object independent of the conscious state, an experience whose
necessary conditions include the presence of the object, the instantia-
tion of the conscious state, and the appropriate relation between
them. This is illustrated by the difference between being in pain and
seeing a mountain. There are enormously complex issues involved
in this distinction and its application to human consciousness, but it
will not be necessary to discuss, much less to settle, any of them in
order to employ this rough distinction for the purpose of illuminating
Hume's obscure remarks on this topic. Hume claims inability to
discover an entity or being called his self and hence also not to be
able to be acquainted with such a being. If Hume or Hume's self
were an entity, then it would make sense prima facie to expect that
entity to have some structural properties and thus that anyone able
to apprehend that self (at least the subject himself) would neces-
sarily apprehend at least some of those structural properties. And
this, I shall argue, is precisely what Hume failed to discover.
The properties which Hume does profess to apprehend are those
of [feeling] "hot or cold, [seeing] light or dark, [feeling] love or
hatred, pain or pleasure." But these evidently did not seem to him
to be appropriate building blocks of an entity which was himself
257
DAVID L. MOUTON
and with good reason. Feeling hot or cold, experiencing the emotions
of love or hatred, and feeling sensations of pain or pleasure are most
plausibly regarded as instances of adverbial conscious states. In
experiencing these states the properties given to one's awareness are
analogous to the functional properties of a mirror.
There are conscious states which appear to constitute the direct
apprehension of the structural properties of objects. This is especially
true of vision. Unfortunately Hume's example of seeing light or dark
hardly qualifies as the apprehension of an object. If one saw only an
unbroken homogeneous expanse of light or dark, this might well be
experienced as nothing more than an adverbial state as e.g. in a
dream and not the apprehension of a structured object in the environ-
ment. Nevertheless, Hume's tendentious choice of an example is of
no real import, since even if we acknowledge the direct visual
apprehension of actual objects, none of them will satisfy his need
since no external object can be identical with one's self. Whatever I
perceive through the senses is unavoidably other than myself.
The body, it might be countered, is an exception to this my
body is clearly at least part of me and hence of my structure an
exception which Hume overlooked due to his commitment to pheno-
menalism. But to attribute Hume's attitude toward the body solely
to his penchant for perceptual phenomenalism is to ignore more
interesting aspects of his thinking. There is no reason to think that
Hume, any more than anyone else, lacked a sense of objecthood or
that he was not equally subject to the influence of what Quine has
called "the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring medium-sized
physical objects."
2
The basic perception of medium-sized objects is
either visual or tactual. These are the objects which fill our world
and with which we have contact from infancy. And of course our
bodies are members of this conceptually primitive class. Hume chose
to explicate the concept of physical object in terms of his impression-
idea schema and as a result he produced a theory with two basic
principles, Coherence and Constancy. (T, 194-5) Given any series
of impressions, if they are ordered in accordance with these two
principles, then the mind, i.e. observer, is led ineluctably to regard
them as constituting a physical object. (T, 210) What Hume fails
to point out is that for each human being, the series of impressions
2\V. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 11.
258
HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
with the highest degrees of Coherence and Constancy are those which
constitute one's own body. All other impressions are less coherent
and constant and are experienced against the backdrop, as it were,
of one's own body. There is therefore absolutely no reason for Hume
to ignore the human body in his philosophical system.
It is far better to conclude that Hume was too much rather than
too little influenced by the paradigm of a medium-sized object. His
rejection of visual properties as constituting or revealing units of his
own self can be explained by reference to his "looking within." In
this Hume is surely correct since my visual acquaintance with myself
qua medium-sized object is in many respects inferior to the visual
acquaintance others have with my body. Yet my acquaintance with
myself is in a basic sense superior to that of any other person, from
which it follows that I should look within, not without, to specify
further this knowledge. Nevertheless, when Hume looked within, he
either was dominated by the paradigm of a medium-sized object or
by some other standard of his goal. Commentators are correct in
holding that the latter is really empty, but we can still make sense of
Hume if we hold to the paradigm of a medium-sized object and
produce an account of what from this perspective Hume was seeking.
Is there any conceivable discovery which a rational being could
make which could constitute the successful end of Hume's quest ?
The answer is Yes and the explanation is as follows. If conscious-
ness is always a state of some substantial entity, be it mind, soul or
nervous system, then the essential structural properties of the conscious
self are those of the substantial base of the conscious states. The
situation reflected in Hume's claim of non-acquaintance is simply that
one is not aware of that substantial base or its structural properties
merely by virtue of being conscious. There are three reasons for this
state of affairs corresponding to three classes of conscious states.
First, some forms of perception are restricted to their own peculiar
"objects," e.g. odors in smelling, sounds in hearing, etc. and these
are not structural properties of objects as is evidenced by the fact that,
if one were limited to such perceptions, there would be no way to
know whether the perceived sounds, odors, etc. emanate from one
or more than one object. Second, we do not normally perceive with
the eyes the eyes themselves. This is however only part of the story
since we do not consider visual experiences as being states of the
eyes. But we are intimately familiar with the role of the eye in seeing
259
DAVID L. MOUTON
due to such ordinary facts as that closing the eyes eliminates the
visual field, rotating one's head swings the visual field with it, and
so forth. Finally, there are conscious states whose intentionality
ranges over everything. Thus we can think about the substantial base
of consciousness, but consciousness of the variety of which thinking
is one type does not constitute the direct apprehension of any natural
object, as is attested by the fact that our thinking of Paris would not
be disturbed in any way by the sudden annihilation of that city at that
same moment. Thus the fact that we can think of anything whatsoever
does not enable us to be thereby acquainted with everything. For
these various reasons no mode of consciousness ranges over its own
substantial base in a manner constituting acquaintance with its
structural properties.
Those conscious states involved in ^looking within" such as reflect-
ing, meditating, mental imagery and introspection are such that, unlike
seeing, there is no particular organ with which we can readily asso-
ciate them. The first three share the non-acquaintance characteristic
with thinking while introspection consists of specialized attention to
that which transpires within, namely, mental imagery, sensations,
feelings, and so forth. Thus if one recedes into a state of philosophical
reflection or follows Descartes and Hume into a representationalist or
phenomenalist reduction, one discovers a realm of functional proper-
ties experientially disconnected from all structural properties. From
this perspective Hume was entirely correct in denying that he could
discover any substantial self, i.e. any structural properties of the
conscious self. The upshot of this discussion is that all the properties
of which we are immediately aware suffer either from the defect of
(1) being functional properties and hence not capable of constituting,
wholly or in part, any entity whatsoever or that of (2) being structural
properties of entities which are not identifiable as the self. Hume's
claim is therefore correct.
This enables us to see what is wrong with the recent charge that
Hume's search for the self is a pseudo-search; "there is nothing that
would count as having an experience of one's self, . . . the expression
'having an experience of one's self' is one for which there is no use,"
as A.J. Ayer has expressed the point.
3
Similarly Sidney Shoemaker
holds that Hume was merely pretending to look for his self since he
3
A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (New York, 1965), p. 49.
260
HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
had no idea what it would be like to succeed and hence no such
bona fide empirical search was possible.
4
We can now see that to
satisfy Hume, it must be possible that the individual in being conscious
is simultaneously aware of the structural properties of the seat of
consciousness as well as his functional properties in being conscious
and thus that each moment of awareness is itself a state of that
structure. Such a situation would guarantee in each of us a sense
of being a substantial entity, a sense we could not elude even by the
most determined retreat into would-be solipsistic meditations. While
this situation does not now obtain, it is not an incoherent or incon-
ceivable one. There is this difference, however, between physicalism
and dualism that our lack of such awareness of the base of conscious-
ness is on the former theory a contingent fact, but on the latter a
necessary feature of our nature.
II
Descartes' position on self-acquaintance is not as readily accessi-
ble as is Hume's due in large part to the complexity of his theory
as well as the looseness of his language. But once his various state-
ments are brought into focus, it becomes clear that he stated three
different positions on this question of which two are equivalent to
Hume's view while the third strikes a note of agnosticism that exceeds
all that Hume ever maintained.
Did Descartes hold that one could be directly aware of oneself
in a way which Hume denied ? Consider first what Descartes under-
stood by the self. He wrote of "the self i.e. the mind, which alone
I at present identify with myself (I, 170)
5
and he equated "my
essence" with "the essence of my mind." (I, 186) A complete man,
for Descartes, is a combination of human body and mind, but the
essential man or self is the mind since the body is not part of one's
essence. Thus, I or my self am identical with a particular mind,
spirit or soul.
Having equated his essential self with his soul or mind, Descartes
does say that there is nothing easier to know than one's mind (I, 157)
4
Sidney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, N. Y., 1963,
p.74.
8
Numbers given in parentheses preceded by T or 'II' refer to pages in the
designated volumes of The Philosophical Works of Descartes, (eds.) E. S.
Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Dover Publications, 1955).
261
DAVID L. MOUTON
but since he made the same statement about knowing God (I, 183),
his concern in each case was knowledge by description or the clear-
ness and distinctness of our ideas rather than any form of direct
acquaintance with the objects in question. For a philosopher with
such implicit faith in the rational connections in the world, it is
understandable that he placed no special emphasis on the distinction
between knowledge achieved through direct acquaintance and that
based upon inferences. It is also the case that Descartes shared with
Hume the philosophical presupposition that nothing ever came direct-
ly before the mind but ideas, thoughts, perceptions and other mental
phenomena. Such a thesis may appear to preclude any discussion
of those objects we can, and those we cannot, immediately perceive
or cognize. Nevertheless both philosophers proceeded to mark and
employ precisely this distinction. It should also be noted that the
Cogito does not serve to distinguish Hume and Descartes in this
regard. Descartes accepted the traditional distinction between essence
and existence and after using the Cogito in Meditation II to establish
his own existence, he freely admits that he does not yet know what
he is in fact in the most graphic way he observes that "I must be
careful to see that I do not imprudently take some other object in
place of myself (!) indicating a degree of detachment and
ignorance of himself to which Hume never approached. (I, 150)
The sense in which I can be acquainted with my own self depends
upon the nature of the self or mind, although unfortunately Descartes'
many diverse statements about the mind do not form one consistent
theory. The official formula states: "That substance in which thought
immediately resides, I call Mind." (II, 53) In some sense the mind
is analysable into two components or aspects, substance and thought,
and the nature of the mind is a function of the natures of thought
and substance and the relation obtaining between them. By 'thought'
Descartes means 'thinking' taken in a very broad sense which
includes doubting, understanding, conceiving, affirming, denying,
willing, refusing, imagining and feeling. (I, 153) The range of
'thinking' is thus at least coextensive with that of 'consciousness.'
"By the word thought I understand all that of which we are conscious
as operating in us." (I, 222) And he makes clear that these various
modes of thinking are modes of the thinking substance where 'mode'
signifies a property which constitutes a real affectation or modifica-
tion of the substance. (I, 241) So a thinking action or event is both
262
HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
a mode today we would tend to say state of some appropriate
substance as well as an activity, action or event. "Further, there
are other [in contrast to physical] activities, which we call thinking
activities, e.g. understanding, willing, imagining, feeling, etc., which
agree in falling under the description of thought, perception or
consciousness." (II, 64)
Descartes' many statements that mind is constituted by a substance
and its thinking modes lead one to expect him to specify the nature
of each of these components or aspects of mind. But it is notorious-
ly the case that he never tells us what the substance is in which
thinking inheres. Indeed, the nature or essence of this substance is,
according to Descartes, thinking. The only clear point which stands
out in this thesis is that thinking, as Descartes understands it, is the
only essential property "the whole essence or nature" (I, 190)
of mental substance.
How does all this relate to the question of self-acquaintance ?
There are three possibilities for each of which Descartes provides
textual support. First, we can take literally his claim that thinking
is the whole essence or nature of mind and, since thinking is itself
necessarily a conscious phenomenon, conclude that we have direct
awareness of ourselves. To do so is to accept the controversial, if
not flatly mistaken, interpretation of Descartes which identifies
thinking and mental substance.
6
Textual support includes the fol-
lowing: "All the attributes taken together are in truth the same
thing as a substance: but not the attributes taken singly apart from
the others."
7
(See also Principles of Philosophy, Part I, No. LXIII;
II, 245-6). A more striking parallel to Hume's thesis that we have
"no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular
qualities" (T, 16) could scarcely be found. And while this does
provide the necessary ontological basis for direct acquaintance with
one's self, it reduces Descartes' view on the matter precisely to that
of Hume, namely, to a bundle theory of substance.
* Precisely this view "the act of thinking is a substance" is ascribed
to Descartes by the phenomenologist Pierre Thevenaz in his essay "Reflexion
and Consciousness of Self" on the grounds that "I become conscious that my
act of thinking needs only itself to 'exist' and to be assured of its existence.
That is the very definition of substance according to Descartes," in What is
Phenomenology ? edited by James M. Edie (Chicago, 1962), p. 125.
7
Oeuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, (eds.), (Paris:
Cerf, 1897 and 1913), v. V, p. 155 and quoted in A. Kenny, Descartes: A
Study of His Philosophy (New York, 1968), p. 67.
263
DAVID L. MOUTON
In spite of the passages in which Descartes seemed to advocate
such a bundle theory, he explicitly rejected it in other passages. He
warned, for example, that "if we wish to consider them [thought and
extension] apart from the substances in which they are, that will
have the effect of our taking them as self-subsisting things and thus
confounding the ideas of mode and substance." (I, 246) What
Descartes considered a confusion Hume incorporated as an explicit
thesis of his system according to which each perception is a self-
sufficient substance, there being no essential distinction between
substance and property (T, 233). By contrast one of the fundamental
tenets of Cartesian metaphysics is that, although "nothing can ever
be deprived of its own essence,"
8
substance and property are never-
theless of two different categories of being which differ ontologically
in that they are of two different degrees of reality. (II, 56) Thinking
is a property, an activity, which inheres in a substance. "Where I
have said, this is the mind, the spirit, the intellect, or the reason, I
understood by these names not merely faculties, but rather what is
endowed with the faculty of thinking;.. ." (II, 62)
Assuming this to be Descartes' preferred view, what follows con-
cerning the accessibility to consciousness of both these aspects of
the mind ? On this Descartes expressed himself clearly: "we do not
have immediate cognition of substances . . . we perceive certain forms
or attributes which must inhere in something in order to have exist-
ence, we name the thing in which they exist a substance." (II, 98)
Again, taken from a context in which the self or mind is itself under
discussion, he writes: "we do not apprehend the substance itself
immediately through itself, but by means only of the fact that it is
the subject of certain activities." (II, 64) On this view, we must
distinguish between the experience of self-scrutiny and the analysis
of the ontology of the self. Hume and Descartes are again in complete
agreement on the former since each denied that in self-awareness
one is aware of any substance in which our thoughts or perceptions
are grounded, but they disagreed as to the necessity of, and thus
the possibility of a sound inference to, such an underlying substratum.
There is a major objection to the above interpretation of Des-
cartes which turns on the question whether there is sufficient dis-
tinction between substance and its essence to permit us to make
8
In a letter to Hyperaspistes (August, 1641) reprinted in Descartes, Philo-
sophical Letters, (ed.) A. Kenny (Oxford, 1970), p. 111.
264
HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
sense of the notions of being acquainted with each of them. This
objection may be put in t he form of an argument :
(1) "We may likewise consider thought [and "the diverse modes of thought
such as understanding, imagining, recollecting, willing, etc."] and extension
[and "the diverse modes of extension"] as the modes which are found in
substance;..." (I, 246)
(2) There are "two sorts of modal distinctions" one of which is "between the
mode properly speaking, and the substance of which it is the mode."
(I, 244)
(3) It is a "fact that we can clearly conceive substance without the mode
which we say differs from it, while we cannot reciprocally have a percep-
tion of this mode without perceiving the substance." (I, 244)
(4) Therefore, there are experiences which constitute perceiving both substance
and its properties.
This argument suggests that Descartes regarded a substance together
with its essential properties as constituting a substantial unity
which qua object of acquaintance or knowledge is indivisible.
Although Descartes does deny a real distinction between thinking
and mind, the foregoing argument is not extended by him to mental
substance. Instead he recognizes, thirdly, the distinction of reason
(ratione) which is "between substance and some of its attributes
without which it is not possible that we should have a distinct knowl-
edge of it, or between two such attributes of the same substance."
(I, 245) This is precisely the status of thinking and mind. Not only
is it true in the trivial sense that without thinking I could not be
aware of and hence know anything, but also in the sense that think-
ing constitutes "the whole essence or nature" of the mind, that is
to say, its only essential property. Descartes makes this explicit
when he writes that "all the modes of thinking which we consider as
though they existed in the objects, differ only in thought (ratione)
both from the objects of which they are the thought and from each
other in a common object." (I, 245) Perceiving the essence of X
does not constitute in all senses perceiving X. In fact when Descartes,
following the passage just quoted, does raise the question of our
knowing a "substance alone, without regarding whether it thinks or
is extended," he holds that it is "more easy to know a substance that
thinks or an extended substance" and he offers as his reason that
"we experience some difficulty in abstracting the notions that we
have of substance from those of thought or extension, for they in
265
DAVID L. MOUTON
truth do not differ but in thought." (I, 246) It did not occur to
him to consider whether we could directly cognize the substance or
whether there is some experience which constitutes the direct cog-
nizing of mental substance; he regarded the question as pertaining
only to the alternative of thinking of substance in abstraction from
its essential properties and even here he saw only a very limited
possibility. Descartes was fully aware that employing 'substance'
in the sense of 'substratum' would lead to difficulties regarding the
residue when the properties were removed, but he embraced this as
an acceptable consequence. He did not think it impugned the con-
cept of a substratum. He wrote that we first "perceive certain forms
or attributes" and secondly recognize that they "must inhere in some-
thing in order to have existence . . ." (II, 98) Then he added: "But
if, afterwards, we desired to strip that substance of those attributes
by which we apprehend it, we should utterly destroy our knowledge
of it; and thus, while we might indeed apply words to it, they would
not be words of the meaning of which we had a clear and distinct
perception." (II, 98-99; italics mine) And of course Descartes must
have realized that the first word to suffer this loss of meaning is
'substance' when understood in this substratum sense. It is clear
from this passage that Descartes, having distinguished mind and
thinking, did not regard the relation between them to be such as
to preclude the possibility that God may perceive a human mind
independently of His perceiving the thinking of that same mind,
whereas such a separation on the part of a human percipient would
destroy the very possibility of his either perceiving or even conceiv-
ing the substance clearly and distinctly apart from its thinking.
The third and final position is the one John Locke ascribed to
Descartes and which formed the basis of the attack in his Castor/
Pollux example. (An Essay Concerning Human Understating, Bk.
II, Ch. I, Sec. 12) Like the others it depends upon the explication
of 'thinking thing' in such passages as: "But then what am I ? A
thing which thinks." (1,153) Locke thought the operative word
here was 'thing' rather than 'thinking'. Apparently he had in mind
either such a familiar phrase as "this I (that is to say, my soul by
which I am what I am)" (I, 190) or the more specific statements
such as "the substance in which they [the "thinking activities"] reside
we call a thinking thing or the mind. . ." (II, 64) From these state-
ments it does follow that I am identical with a certain substratum
266
HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
and hence am imperceptible even to myself and therefore that I
cannot be immediately acquainted with myself. This is a far more
radical thesis than that maintained by Hume. In fact it is absurd,
and so may be fairly dismissed as a product of careless writing.
In summing up, there appear to be three possible interpretations
of Descartes' position on self-acquaintance, two of which accord
with what Hume wrote and the third of which renders self-acquain-
tance absolutely impossible. According to the first I am identical with
a certain stream of thoughts, and self-scrutiny is both possible and a
fact. The second holds that I am identical with a stream of thoughts
plus a substance in which they inhere, and self-scrutiny is possible
for the stream but impossible for the substance. The third holds that
I am identical with the substance in which my thinking inheres and
self-acquaintance is impossible.
in
The thesis I am proposing in order to explain the position of Hume
and Descartes on self-acquaintance is this: Although (1) all con-
sciousness is a state of some entity or substance and (2) all conscious-
ness is an awareness of some object, the range of possible substitution
instances of the object for human beings either does not include the
underlying substantial base at all or it includes it in a manner not
capable of grounding acquaintance with that base. In part this is the
generalization of the rather trivial point that just as in seeing one
does not see one's eyes, so in the conscious state called thinking
one is not thereby acquainted with the substantial base. But the
commonplace and possibly factual nature of this thesis is completely
incommensurate with its importance in philosophical reflection. In
discussing Hume's non-acquaintance claim, A. H. Basson comments
that, "This amounts to saying the perceptual relation is asymmetrical,"
a thesis, he then adds, "which itself demands proof."
9
His first point
is correct but the second, although complicated by Hume's identifica-
tion of being conscious and perceiving, is nevertheless mistaken; no
proof could be required for the asymmetry of all those conscious
relations relevant to being acquainted with the base of consciousness
since the entire mind/body problem stems from this property. There
must be some reason why the instrumentality of walking is accepted
9 A. H. Basson, David Hume (Penguin Books, 1958), p. 127.
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DAVID L. MOUTON
without dispute as the legs, whereas the instrumentality of thinking
is a moot philosophical issue. If every, or even some, moment of
consciousness constituted an acquainting awareness, inter alia, of its
own substantial base, then there would be no mystery as to the
identity of that to which 'mind' refers. And if this situation had
obtained, Hume and Descartes would never have denied direct
acquaintance with the thing which thinks and thus the entire history
of the mind/body problem would have been aborted since it would
be obvious to each conscious being what the structural properties were
which underlie his consciousness and, therefore, his self (in the sense
relevant to Cartesian and Humean reflections).
In Stuart Hampshire's well-known review of The Concept of Mind,
he criticises Ryle for suggesting that "the origin of the conception of
the mind as a ghost within a machine is of purely historical and of
no philosophical interest."
10
The ghost in the machine hypothesis
has the double-barreled purpose of explaining both the seat of con-
sciousness and the source of actions. These problems have very
different characteristics and the concern of this paper is only with
the former. In response to Ryle's claim, Hampshire points out that
"so far from being imposed on the plain man by philosophical
theorists, and even less by seventeenth century theorists, the myth
of the mind as a ghost within the body is one of the most primitive
and natural of all the innumerable myths which are deeply inbedded
in the vocabulary and structure of our language."
n
Hampshire does
not then proceed to provide an explanation for this "universal feature
of ordinary language."
M
Perhaps one should not assume that there
is any one sufficient condition. I have already mentioned the distinc-
tion between actions and conscious states. Yet, I think, for the latter
the asymmetry thesis is at least a necessary condition. There would
have been no myth of the mind to explain consciousness without this
asymmetry. One may further wonder how in view of this thesis a
philosopher can ever rest any real theoretical weight on such an
inference as that to the indivisibility of the mind. For if we can only
be acquainted with the conscious states and never with their substan-
tial base, then any additional property ascribed to the latter must be
inferred from the former. But from what property of my states of
10 Stuart Hampshire, Review of The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle, in Mind,
vol. LIX, 1950, p. 239.
" Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 240.
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HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE
awareness can I infer that they are modes of a substantial base which
must be indivisible ?
A final point: Wittgenstein once asked: "Could one imagine a
stone's having consciousness ?" (PI # 390) Part of the thrust of this
question and of the remainder of his Philosophical Investigations is
to bring out the philosophical significance of the criteria governing
words in ordinary language. Whatever the manifold criteria of con-
sciousness may be, a stone cannot meet them. The thesis of this
paper points up a second aspect of Wittgenstein's bizarre example.
If a stone were conscious in the manner of a philosopher indulging
in Cartesian meditations, i.e. if it could think but lacked all sensory
perception, then there would be no feature of its conscious states in
so reflecting which could reveal that it was a stone. And if to this
were then added the powers of sensory perception, it would recognize
itself as a "thinking stone" but there would still remain ample logical
space within which to wonder what the nature of the base of its
consciousness is. And in this its situation would parallel our own.
Roosevelt University DAVID L. MOUTON
269