Kenny Anthony. Philosophy in the Modern World: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 4

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not a part of myself, not even a very central part of myself; it is, obviously

enough, myself. We talk of ‘my body’, but the possessive pronoun does

not mean that there is an ‘I’ which is the possessor of a body that is

other than myself. My body is not the body that I have, but the body that

I am, just as the city of Rome is not a city that Rome has but the city that

Rome is.

The second thing that is meant by saying that the mind is not a spirit is

that it is not some ghostly medium or locus of mental events and processes

that is accessible only by introspection. Wittgenstein frequently attacked a

mythology about the nature of the mind that we are all prone to accept.

We imagine a mechanism in our minds, a strange mechanism that works

very well in its own mysterious medium but which, if understood as a

mechanism in the ordinary sense, is quite unintelligible. Wittgenstein

thought that this was a piece of hidden or latent nonsense. The way to

turn latent nonsense into patent nonsense was to imagine that the mech-

anism really existed.

There is a temptation to think, for instance, that when you recognize

somebody what you do is to consult a mental picture of her and check

whether what you now see matches the picture. Wittgenstein suggests that

if we have this nonsensical idea in our mind we can make ourselves see that

it is nonsense, and that it in no way explains recognition. If we suppose the

process to happen in the real world, with the picture as a real and not just a

mental picture, our initial problem just returns. How do we recognize that

this is a picture of a particular person in order to use it to recognize her?

The only thing that gave the illusion of explanation in this case was the

fuzzy nature of the original supposition; the fact that the process was

supposed to take place in the ghostly medium of the mind.

The task of a scientific theory of the mind, according to some philo-

sophers and psychologists, is to establish a principle of correlation between

the occurrence of mental states and processes and the occurrence of states

and processes in the brain. This correlation would only be a possibility if

mental events (e.g. thoughts, or flashes of understanding) were themselves

measurable in the way in which physical events are measurable. But

thought and understanding are not processes in a psychic medium in

the way in which electrolysis and oxidization are processes in a physical

medium. Thought and understanding are not processes at all, as Wittgen-

stein showed by a painstaking analysis of uses of the words ‘think’ and

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‘understand’. The criteria by which we decide whether someone under-

stands a sentence, for instance, are quite different from the criteria by

which we decide what mental processes are going on while he is uttering or

writing the sentence (PG 148).

Those who think of the mind as a ghostly medium, and thought and

understanding as processes occurring there, regard the medium as access-

ible by introspection, and only by introspection. The mind, on this view, is

an inner space that deserves exploration at least as much as outer space.

But whereas—given enough time, money, and energy—everyone can

explore the same outer space, each of us can only explore our own inner

space. We do so by looking within at something to which we ourselves have

direct access, but which others can learn of only indirectly, by accepting

our verbal testimony or making inferences from our physical behaviour.

The connection between consciousness on the one hand, and speech and

behaviour on the other, is on this view a purely contingent one.

To demolish this conception was one of Wittgenstein’s great merits. If

the connection between consciousness and expression is merely contin-

gent, then for all we know everything in the universe may be conscious. It

is perfectly consistent with the idea that consciousness is something

private, with which we make contact only in our own case, that the

chair on which I am now sitting may be conscious. For all we know,

may it not be in excruciating pain? Of course, if it is, we have to add the

hypothesis that it is also exhibiting stoical fortitude. But why not?

If consciousness really is merely contingently connected with its expres-

sion in behaviour, can we be confident in our ascription of it to other

human beings? Our only evidence that humans are conscious is that each

of us, if he looks within himself, sees consciousness there. But how can a man

generalize his own case so irresponsibly? He cannot look within others:

it is the essence of introspection that it should be something that we all

have to do for ourselves. Nor can he make a causal deduction from other

people’s behaviour. A correlation between other people’s consciousness

and their behaviour could never be established when the first term of the

correlation is in principle unobservable.

‘Only of a human being’, Wittgenstein wrote, ‘and what resembles

(behaves like) a human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is

blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (PI i. 281). This does not

mean that he is a behaviourist; he is not identifying experience with

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215

behaviour, or even with dispositions to behave. The point is that what

experiences one can have depends on how one can behave. Only someone

who can play chess can feel the desire to castle; only someone who can talk

can be overcome by an impulse to swear. Only a being that can eat can be

hungry, and only a being that can discriminate between light and darkness

can have visual experiences.

The relation between experiences of certain kinds, and the capacity to

behave in certain ways, is not a merely contingent connection. Wittgenstein

made a distinction between two kinds of evidence that we may have for the

obtaining of states of affairs, namely symptoms and criteria. Where the connec-

tion between a certain kind of evidence and the conclusion drawn from it is

a matter of empirical discovery, through theory and induction, the evidence

may be called a symptom of the state of affairs; where the relation between

evidence and conclusion is not something discovered by empirical investi-

gation, but is something that must be grasped by anyone who possesses the

concept of the state of affairs in question, then the evidence is not a mere

symptom, but a criterion of the event in question. A red sky at night may be

a symptom of good weather the following morning, but the absence of

clouds, the shining of the sun, etc. tomorrow morning are not just symp-

toms but criteria for the good weather. Similarly, scratchin g is a criterion for

itching, and reciting ‘Three Blind Mice’ is a criterion for knowing it—

though of course not everyone who itches scratches, and one can know

the rhyme for years and years without ever reciting it.

Exploiting the notion of criterion enabled Wittgenstein to steer between

the Scylla of dualism and the Charybdis of behaviourism. He agreed with

dualists that particular mental events could occur without accompanying

bodily behaviour; on the other hand he agreed with behaviourists that the

possibility of ascribing mental acts to people depends on such acts having,

in general, a behavioural expression.

If it is wrong to identify the mind with behaviour, it is even more

mistaken, according to Wittgenstein, to identify the mind with the brain.

Such materialism is in fact a grosser philosophical error than behaviourism

because the connection between mind and behaviour is a more intimate

one than that between mind and brain. The relation between mind and

behaviour is a criterial one, something prior to experience; the connection

between mind and brain is a contingent one, discoverable by empirical

science. Any discovery of links between mind and brain must take as its

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216

starting point the everyday concepts we use in describing the mind,

concepts that are grafted on to behavioural criteria.

Oddly enough, developments in the philosophy of mind since Wittgen-

stein have shown that it is possible to combine the errors of materialism

with those of dualism. One of the most ubiquitous misunderstandings of

the natu re of the mind is the picture of mind’s relation to body as that

between a little person or homunculus on the one hand, and a tool or

instrument or machine on the other. We smile when medieval painters

represent the death of the Virgin Mary by showing a small-scale model

virgin emerging from her mouth; but basically the same idea can be found

in the most unlikely places, including the writings of cognitive scientists.

Descartes, when first he reported the occurrence of retinal images, warned

us not to be misled by the resemblance between images and their objects into

thinking that when we saw the object we had another pair of eyes, inside our

A mosaic from S. Marco in Venice shows God infusing a soul into Adam – the soul

being a homunculus with wings.

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brain, to see the images. But he himself believed that seeing was to be explained

by saying that the soul encountered an image in the pineal gland. This was a

particularly striking version of what has been nicknamed ‘the homunculus

fallacy’—the attempt to explain human experience and behaviour by postu-

lating a little human within an ordinary human.

What is wrong with the homunculus fallacy? In itself there is nothing

misguided in speaking of images in the brain, if one means patterns in the

brain, observable to a neurophysiologist, that can be mapped on to features

of the visible environment. What is misleading is to take these mappings as

representations, to regard them as visible to the mind, and to say that

seeing consists in the mind’s perception of these images.

The misleading aspect is that such an account pretends to explain

seeing, but the explanation reproduces exactly the puzzling features it

was supposed to explain. For it is only if we think of the relation between

a mind and an image in the pineal gland as being just like the relation

between a human being and pictures seen in the environment that

we will think that talk of an encounter between the mind and the

image has any illuminating power at all. But whatever needs explaining

in the human turns up grinning and unexplained in the shape of the

manikin.

At the present time, when energetic efforts are being made to construct

a new cognitive science of the mind, it is the brain, or parts of the brain,

that are usually assigned the role of the homunculus. We may be told that

our brains ask questions, solve problems, decode signals, and construct

hypotheses. Those who ascribe human capabilities to parts of human

beings are unmindful of Wittgenstein’s warning, ‘Only of a human being

and what resembles (behaves like) a human being can one say: it has

sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’

But the same point had been made millennia ago by Aristotle, who wrote,

‘To say that the soul gets angry is as if one were to say that the soul weaves

or builds a house. Probably it is better not to say that the soul pities, or

learns, or thinks, but that the human being does these things with its soul’

(de Anima 408b12–15).

Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind was in fact closer to that of Aristotle

than it is to contemporary materialist psychology. At one point he coun-

tenanced the possibility that there may be mental activities that lack any

correlate in the brain:

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No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the

brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible

to read off thought-processes from brain processes. . . . It is perfectly possible that

certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because

physiologically nothing corresponds to them. I saw this man years ago: now I have

seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have

to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? . . . Why should there not

be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If

this upsets our concept of causality, then it is high time it was upset. (Z 608–10)

This frontal attack on the idea that there must be physical counterparts of

mental phenomena was not intended as a defence of any kind of dualism.

The entity that does the associating, thinking, and remembering is not a

spiritual substance, but a corporeal human being. But Wittgenstein did seem

to be envisaging as a possibility an Aristotelian soul or entelechy, which

operates with no material vehicle—a formal and final cause to which there

corresponds no mechanistic efficient cause.

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Ethics

The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number

n most systems of morality, happiness is a concept of great importance.

A long series of moral philosophers, tracing their ancestry back to Plato

and Aristotle, had treated happiness as the supreme good, and some

ethicists went so far as to affirm that human beings seek happiness in all

their choices.1 In challenging the primacy of happiness, Kant was unusual.

In his Groundwork he proclaimed that duty, not happiness, was the supr eme

ethical motive. At first sight, therefore, when Bentham declared that every

action should be evaluated in accordance with the tendency it appears to

have to augment or diminish happiness, he was just reaffirming a long-

standing consensus. But on closer inspection Bentham’s greatest happiness

principle is very different from traditional eudaimonism.

In the first place, Bentham identifies happiness with pleasure: it is

pleasure that is the supreme spring of action. The Introduction to the Principles

of Morals and Legislation famously begins:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain

and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to

determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong,

on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They

govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to

throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. (P 1. 1)

To maximize happiness, therefore, for Bentham, is the same thing as to

maximize pleasure. Utilitarians could cite Plato as a forebear, since in his

1 See vol. I, p. 81; vol. II, p. 272.

Protagoras he had offered for discussion the thesis that virtue consists in the

correct choice of pleasure and pain.2 Aristotle, on the other hand, made a

distinction between happiness and pleasure, and in particular refused to

identify happiness with the pleasures of the senses. Bentham by contrast

not only treated happiness as equivalent to pleasure, but regarded pleasure

itself as simply a sensation. ‘In this matter we want no refinement, no

metaphysics. It is not necessary to consult Plato, nor Aristotle. Pain and

pleasure are what everybody feels to be such.’

Bentham was careful to point out that pleasure was a sensation that

could be caused not only by eating and drinking and sex, but also by a

multitude of other things, as varied as the acquisition of wealth, kindness

to animals, or belief in the favour of a Supreme Being. So critics who

regarded Bentham’s hedonism as a call to sensuality were quite mistaken.

However, whereas for a thinker like Aristotle pleasure was to be identified

with the activity enjoyed, for Bentham the relation between an activity and

its pleasure was one of cause and effect. Whereas for Aristotle the value of a

pleasure was the same as the value of the activity enjoyed, for Bentham the

value of each and every pleasure was the same, no matter how it was

caused. ‘Quantity of pleasure being equal’, he wrote, ‘push-pin is as good as

poetry.’ What went for pleasure went for pain, too: the quantity of pain,

and not its cause, is the measure of its disvalue.

It is the quantification of pleasure and pain, therefore, that is of prime

importance for a utilitarian: in deciding on an action or a policy we need to

estimate the amount of pleasure and the amount of pain likely to ensue.

Bentham was aware that such quantification was no trivial task, and he

offered recipes for the measurement of pleasures and pains. Pleasure A

counts more than pleasure B if it is more intense, or if it lasts longer, or if it

is more certain, or if it is more immediate. In the ‘felicific calculus’ these

different factors must be taken into account and weighed against each

other. In judging pleasure-producing actions we must also consider

fecundity and purity: a pleasurable action is fecund if it is likely to produce

a subsequent series of pleasures, and it is pure if it is unlikely to produce a

subsequent series of pains. All these factors are to be taken into account

when we are operating the calculus with respect to our own affairs; if we

are considering public policy, we must further consider another factor,

2 See vol. I, p. 263.

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which Bentham calls ‘extension’—that is, how widely the pains and

pleasures will be spread across the population.

Bentham offered a mnemonic rhyme to aid in operating the calculus:

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—

Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.

Such pleasures seek if private be thy end;

If it be public, wide let them extend.

Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view

If pains must come, let them extend to few. (P 4. 2)

In using the felicific calculus for purposes of determining public policy,

extension is the crucial factor. ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest

number’ is an impressive slogan; but when probed it turns out to be

riddled with ambiguity.

The first question to be raised is ‘greatest number of what?’ Should we add

‘voters’ or ‘citizens’ or ‘males’ or ‘human beings’ or ‘sentient beings’? It

makes a huge difference which answer we give. Throughout the two

centuries of utilitarianism’s history most of its devotees would probably

give the answer ‘human beings’, and this is most likely the answer that

Bentham would have given. He did not advocate women’s suffrage, but

only because he thought that to do so would provoke outrage; in principle

he thought that on the basis of the greatest happiness principle ‘the claim

of [the female] sex is, if not still better, at least altogether as good as that of

the other’ (B ix. 108–9).

In recent years many utilitarians have extended the happiness principle

beyond humankind to other sentient beings, claiming that animals have

equal claims with human beings. Though a great lover of animals (espe-

cially cats) Bentham himself did not go as far as this, and he would have

rejected the idea that animals have rights, because he did not believe in

natural rights of any kind. But by making the supreme moral criterion a

matter of sensation he made it appropriate to consider animals as belong-

ing to the same moral community as ourselves since animals as well as

humans feel pleasure and pain. This, in the long term, proved to be one of

the most significant consequences of Bentham’s break with the classical

and Christian moral tradition, which placed supreme moral value in

activities not of the sense but of the reason, and regarded non-rational

animals as standing outside the moral community.

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A second question about the principle of utility is this: should individ-

uals, or politicians, in following the greatest happiness principle attempt to

control the number of candidates for happiness (however these are def-

ined)? Does the extension of happiness to a greater number mean that we

should try to bring more people (or animals) into existence? What answer

we give to this is linked to a third, even more difficult, question: when we

are measuring the happiness of a population, do we consider only total

happiness, or should we also consider average happiness? Should we take

account of the distribution of happiness as well as of its quantity? If so, then

we have to strike a difficult balance between quantity of happiness and

quantity of people.

This issue is a problem rather for political philosophy than for moral

philosophy. But even if we restrict our consideration to matters of

individual morality, there remains a problem raised by the initial passage

of the Introduction quoted above. The hedonism there proclaimed is twofold:

there is a psychological hedonism (pleasure determines all our actions) and

an ethical hedonism (pleasure is the standard of right and wrong). But the

pleasure cited in psychological hedonism is the pleasure of the individual

person; the pleasure invoked in ethical hedonism is the pleasure (however

quantified) of the total moral community. If I am, in fact, predetermined in

every action to aim at maximizing my own pleasure, what point is there in

telling me that I am obliged to maximize the common good? This was a

problem that was to exercise some of Bentham’s successors in the utilita-

rian tradition.

Bentham commended utilitarianism by contrasting it with other ethical

systems. The second chapter of the Introduction is entitled ‘Of Principles Adverse

to that of Utility’. He lists two such principles, the first being the principle of

asceticism, and the second the principle of sympathy and antipathy. The

principle of asceticism is the mirror image of the principle of utility, approving

of actions to the extent that they tend to diminish the quantity of happiness.

A man who accepts the principle of sympathy and antipathy, on the other

hand, judges actions as good or bad to the extent that they accord or not with

his own feelings (P 2. 2).

Bentham’s principle of asceticism set up a straw man. Religious tradi-

tions have indeed set a high value on self-denial and mortification of

the flesh; but even among religious teachers it is rare to find one who

makes the infliction of suffering upon oneself the overarching principle of

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