1.3 Outline
2.1.5 Aristotle’s Problem
It was argued, on page 27 above, that it is misleading to credit Aristotle with the count of five senses and also suggested that Aristotle’s problem was not, as Brian Keeley put it, how the human senses should be counted. Moreover, a deep chasm between modern views and older traditions regarding the senses was indicated, and these old traditions stemmed partly from Aristotle. Before glancing at some of the new senses identified in scientific investigations, it is thus appropriate to say something about Aristotle’s purpose in his work on the soul.
From the discussion of the four main criteria whereby the senses are dis- tinguished and counted, it is evident that none of the criteria stand alone and attempting to privilege them one by one leads to difficulties. Since it seems perverse to suggest that any of the four of sensation, organ, stimulus and be- haviour are irrelevant to counting the senses, it is natural to seek a framework which gives each aspect its due and provides what might be called a systematic or even ‘cosmological’ account of the senses. This is Aristotle’s real problem.
The truth of this is revealed by even a cursory reading of de Anima and there is no need to go into detail, but Aristotle is seeking a satisfying, unified account of how our senses operate, indeed of how cognition works in general. This is a very difficult problem and it is no surprise that in following an empir- ically informed procedure Aristotle runs into inconsistencies and issues which cannot be satisfactorily resolved on the evidence at hand. The counting prob- lem does arise for Aristotle but the philosopher is relatively relaxed about how many special senses should be counted, and offers an argument why five is cosmically necessary68 even as he entertains the possibility that there are only
four (taste is a species of touch69), or that touch might be considered as mul-
tiple senses.70 The priority is not criteria for counting but mechanisms and clear distinctions which can serve, eventually, to understand the varieties of perception.
It might be supposed that what Aristotle associates with each external sense can also be used in criteria for counting. But these criteria do not map neatly onto the four modern ones presented here. In Aristotle and the tradition following him, what belongs to each sense are the specific objects of sense (e.g. colour), the incidental objects of sense (e.g. a red teapot), the common sensibles
68Barnes (1984, pp. 675–677).
69Barnes (1984, p. 671), cf. Wallace (1976, p. lxvi). 70Barnes (1984, p. 672).
(asingle object of a certainshapeand size, etc.), the organs (e.g. eyes) and, in relation to specific mechanisms, the medium needed between, say, the visible object and the eye (the medium is the pellucid for light, the empty for sound, etc.).
It is a rather elementary error to think that our four criteria and, in par- ticular, our distinction between sensation and stimulus71 can be grafted onto
the ancient tradition. In fact, as we have already seen to some extent, it is this distinction which causes the main worries in the counting problem (should sensations be ignored? are there many senses or should we simply consider a unified flow of structured information?), and the particular problem of a slide to two incompatible extremes does not arise for Aristotle at all.
The attractiveness of a unified account is clear and in Aristotle’s system the organ, medium and object are not to be used as separate criteria, they all belong necessarily to sense. So if we have a particular sensation we should look for an organ, and given the mode of operation we should identify the medium. Only when we cannot use testimony to check that the sensation is the same—for animals and for people who cannot speak our language— then overt behaviour or gesture or cry might serve as confirmation that the individual in question feels a pain or sees something just as we do, but this is of as little use in individuating senses as the incidental objects such as cats or teapots are.
Aristotle’s schema for perception is explained clearly by Abraham Edel.72 For vision, the transactional nature of perception requires the presence of or- gan, medium, object, and that which makes perception actual, in this case fire:
One precondition is the eye, as part of the living body. The other is the surface of the object. The one is potentially seeing, the other potentially colored. In between is a continuous medium. This Aris- totle identifies not as air, but as a finer substance shared by air, water, and the eternal fifth substance; he calls it the “diaphanous” or “transparent”. In this situation, fire serves to precipitate ac- tualization, just as the striking does in hearing or heat does in digestion. At once the unified actuality is there. The eye is actu-
71Whether it is the proximal or distal stimulus is not very relevant, since what matters is that we describe the stimulus as physically real and use the language of theoretical physics, rather than a named sensation to specify it.
ally seeing, the object is actually colored, the medium is actually transparent. This energetic state of the medium is what Aristotle calls “light”.73
The insistence on a systematic approach (in contrast to searching for and analysing individual criteria to help with counting or classifying) is as promi- nent in Reid as it is in Aristotle. This is one of the main reasons for listening to Reid. The other is that Reid sits on the near side to us of Descartes and Locke, and tries to give a unified account of sense in the context of a sharp di- vision between subjective, private experience and a real, physical world which “hath a permanent existence, independent of the mind”.74 Whether he suc-
ceeds or not is not as important as the way he goes about trying, and what really counts is his attempt to place the subject and the object in a systematic relation, denying neither an ineliminable role in perception.
The difficulty of disentangling the subjective and mental from the real and physical, or of fitting them justly together, is reflected in the taxonomic difficulty explained above: the tension between the multitude of sensations cultivated and identified in shared experience, and the descriptions of objects given in our best physics, with these two pulling in opposite directions when an explicit count of the senses is needed. This difficulty really does not exist for Aristotle. Instead, as Edel explains:
His definition of the psyche, cast in terms of potentiality and actu- ality, bypasses the dualism of body and mind. It opens the way to a full naturalism in which the continuities and differences of plant, animal, and human can be studied scientifically. That an actuality is a joint or single actualization or fulfillment of agent and patient (of the organism and the environment) makes it possible to see the phenomenal as qualities of the transactional situation rather than as locked away in a private mind. The relation between the phenomenal and the physical or physiological is captured in the Aristotelian relation of form and matter, which ensures a relative and nonreductive character in their distinction.75
This transactional or relational framework for perception is a world away from those modern ideas about the causes and mechanisms underlying our conscious
73Edel (1982, p. 149). 74Reid (2000, p. 43). 75Edel (1982, p. 157).
experience which deprecate the perceiver’s role to that of a patient, or pas- sive subject. Recent attempts to revivify the perceiver, for example by Alva No¨e or some of those who explore the implications of brain plasticity,76 are
encouraging but they do not automatically help with the counting problem. To make progress with counting requires three further steps. Firstly, to be clear on what is being counted, secondly, to recognise that what we call our senses are not independently functioning faculties of the organism, and hence, not elemental modes of perception, and thirdly, to supplement the list of perceptual modes so clearly incomplete in naive and traditional counts, so that other modes can be considered and used to analyse and explain the complex accomplishments which we call seeing, hearing, and so on. Only the preliminary work for this formidable programme is attempted in what follows and the counting problem may not have a unique or permanent solution. As we shall see, however, even noticing that the traditional senses do not work independently, and investigating what some of the less familiar senses yield, can be extremely valuable.