Monday 23 January 2012
This is a topical note, and the composition of such a document is a very risky undertaking
for someone as absent minded and easily distracted as I. I therefore
start with a date. This note describes the state of my reading on the date shown immediately beneath the heading and records books I've read this year.
This is volume 1 in the Penguin Freud Library and one of the many books I inherited from my Father, who had most of the volumes in that series.
I hadn't read anything by Freud since my late teens. As a schoolboy and then an undergraduate I found his writing quite plausible; now it seems much less persuasive
Freud's argument consists of a string of anecdotes interpreted as signs of unconcious desires, punctuated by attempts to anticipate sceptical objections. The answers to objections come close to a general defence of gullibility. In the early lectures the anecdotes involved what Freud called 'parapraxes' inadvertent actions like slips of the tongue, losing things, dropping things, going to an appointment on the wrong day, missing a train, or getting off it at the wrong station.
The idea of unconcious mental states is a tricky one. If we classify all brain activity as mental, there are certainly many mental states and events of which we are not concious, but we usually define 'mental' more narrowly than that, to include beliefs, likes, dislikes, desires and intentions. The unconcious mental states that interested Freud were supposed unconcious desires linked to the basic instincts for nutrition, and especially for reproduction.
There is a serious gap in all Freud's analyses of examples. While he shows that the various slips of the tongue he cites could express the wishes of the speaker, he never explains why he believes those wishes were unconcious; they might well have been conscious wishes. I think Freud may have confused 'unconcious' with 'unacknowledged'. people often have wishes they consider it prudent to conceal, but that does not make those wishes unconcious. Freud only very rarely mentions questioning speakers about their parapraxes. Furthermore Freud made no attempt at statistical analysis of parapraxes in general. It might be that such an analysis would reveal that only a small proportion admitted analysis as expressions of concealed desires; if that were so the cases Freud cites might just be coincidences.
Freud several times refers to a story about an occasion when the President of the lower house of the Austrian Parliament opened a new sitting of the house by saying, not 'I declare this session open' but 'I declare this session closed'. Freud attributed the slip of the tongue to the President subconciously fearing that the new session might do more harm than good. While the President may well have been thinking on those lines, he need not have been doing so unconciously. Indeed, if he were an astute politician he might have been quite conciously apprehensive.
Freud's remarks on why people lose things were intriguing. He started by saying people lose things because they want to be rid of them, either because they dislike them, or because those things have disagreeable associations. He then remarked that sometimes people lose things they value through 'an intention to sacrifice something to fate in order to ward off some other dreaded loss'. (p 106) A wish to punish oneself, or to show defiance are also suggested as explanations of people losing things they value. Such elaborations threaten to make the theory untestable. It is one thing to say people lose things because they don't value them, but quite another to say people lose things either because they don't value them, or because they do.
I've had this book for over 30 years. I think I read most of it shortly after buying it, but, on noticing it on my bookshelves, realised I could rememeber hardly anything Quinton said, so I decided to re-read it.
I find it quite hard work. Quinton writes very clearly, so the difficulty is not his English, but rather the obstruseness of the subject matter and the intricacy of the argument. Most Philosophy books seem to be written in the hope that they might be intelligible to someone who has no previous acquaitance with Philosophy. Hence they either treat their subject matter rather superficially, or are very long. Some Philosophy books are both. The Nature of Things is unusual in being what one might call an advanced book on Philosophy. It would be unintelligible to someone unfamiliar with Philosophical debate. That makes it possible for Quinton to advance his argument much further than would otherwise be possible, and the time neeeded to follow his argument carefully is time well spent.
Quinton expounds materialism, in Descarte's sense of matter as that which occupies space. He argues that when we claim something exists, the claim always depends ultimately on identifying something present at some spatial location, or some event occurring at a spatial location.
I found the discusions about perception particularly difficult. Quinton argued against the common claim that knowledge about material objects must depend on logically prior knowledge about sense experience. He notices that we often come to reliable beliefs about material objects without performing any inferences from beliefs about sense experience, and infers that when that happens we have direct knowledge about material objects. I think he overlooks the possibility that we jump to conclusions as a matter of habit, and that habits survive because they are fairly reliable, so, although there is often no inference from sense experience to beliefs about the material world, those beliefs are only formed because an inference would be available if anyone looked for one. I wonder if that would count as an example of an unconcious inference?