Cognition and Sensation: A Reconstruction of Herder’s Quasi-Empiricism

Cognition and Sensation 19 Cognition and Sensation: A Reconstruction of Herder’s Quasi-Empiricism Philip Yaure I n this paper, I will attempt a reconstruction of Herder’si central thesis in the philosophy of mind, which we might term ‘quasi-empiricism,’ drawing on his On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778) and On Images, Poetry, and Fable (1787). Because of the ‘roughed up’ style of Herder’s philosophical prose, I take this to be a non-trivial task, requiring both heavy interpretive work and philosophical assessment in order to render it into a clear, coherent doctrine. I will decompose the thesis into its two parts: first, its empiricist aspect, which amounts to the claim that our (physically grounded) sensations determine our cognitions; second, its ‘quasi’ aspect, which amounts to the claim that our sensations depend on, in some sense, our conceptual framework, instantiated by our cognitions. I will show that Herder’s commitment to an empiricist picture is bound up with his commitment to a naturalistic concept of the mind, and that the complication of the ‘quasi’ arm of the thesis, that sensations depend on concepts, must be construed in light of these naturalistic commitments. Along the way, I will resist objections from a ‘pure empiricist’ standpoint that attempt to undermine Herder’s motivation for positing the influence of con- Philip Yaure is a third year at the University of Chicago, majoring in philosophy and medieval studies. Two projects that he is attempting to juggle at the moment focus on issues in modal epistemology and skepticism, on the one hand, and depictions of the stigmatization of Francis of Assisi in thirteenth century Italy, on the other. In terms of future prospects, he hopes to pursue a PhD in philosophy. Outside of the academy, Philip enjoys competing at the World Boardgaming Championships each year in Lancaster, PA. 20 Philip Yaure cepts on sensations, as well as an interpretation (Beiser’s) that unnecessarily weakens Herder’s thesis by improperly construing its naturalistic commitment.ii I. The Empiricist Arm Herder’s commitment to an empiricist picture is clearly articulated in both On the Cognitions and On Images: “[the soul] only cognizes what this place shows it…. It must use the irritations, the senses, the forces and opportunities which became its own through a fortunate, unearned inheritance”iii; “Human cognition starts from the senses and from experience, and everything comes back to them.”iv For Herder, all cognition is dependent upon sensation, so that reason would be unable to operate without the experiential materials provided to it by the senses. We can also see that Herder is committed to a stronger claim, that cognitions are not only dependent on their corresponding sensations, but moreover constitutedv by them, in light of his naturalistic picture of the mind. Structurally, On the Cognitions builds the mind from the ground up, so to speak, starting with the physical phenomenon of irritations and eventually proceeding to the cognitions which these irritations constitute. Herder identifies irritations as contractions and expansions of bodily fibers, which he asserts as conditions for mental phenomena: “perhaps without this sowing of obscure stirrings and irritations our most divine forces [i.e.: those of the mind] would not exist.”vi He grounds this claim in the correlation of behaviors with the stimulation of these fibers: “The courage of the lion, like the fearfulness of the hare, lies ensouled in its inner structure…. The heart of Achilles was shaken in its plexus by black anger, it required irritability to become an Achilles.”vii Strictly speaking, the final sentence asserts irritations as only a necessary condition (‘required’) for cognitions, but soon after Herder articulates the stronger claim that irritations are also sufficient conditions: “In my modest opinion, no psychology is possible which is not in each step determinate physiology.”viii Mental phenomena are thus determined by physical phenomena of irritations.ix The link with Herder’s empiricist position becomes clear Cognition and Sensation 21 once we note that sensations are realized by irritations, or, more precisely, that the term ‘sensation’ picks out a subset of irritations, namely those that stand in a causal relation to an external object via the senses: “All coarse senses, fibers, and irritations can only sense in themselves; the object must come in addition, touch them, and in a certain sense itself become one with them. Here a way is already opened for cognition outside us.”x Thus, Herder’s empiricist picture emerges (unsurprisingly) as a naturalist one: mental states are determined by physical irritations, either, in the case of subjective states like emotions, by ‘irritations in themselves’ (i.e.: not causally related to a sense), or, in the case of objective cognitions (those whose content is about the external world), by irritations that stand in a causal relation to a sensory organ (sensations), which is in turn causally related to an external object. It is important to note (as this will serve as a crucial premise later on), that while Herder commits himself to a naturalistic story about our mental states, he does not go so far as to reduce them to sensations, insofar as a reduction would imply elimination. One may find such a move appealing—given that we can show mental phenomena to be realized by physical phenomena (in this context, irritations), it is not a great leap further to claim that mental phenomena are identical to their physical realizers, and nothing ‘over and above’ them. But it is clear that Herder wants to avoid such a notion of cognitions: “the head has the power to bring sensations which flow through the body into a single representation, and to guide the former through the latter, which seems to be of such a different nature.”xi Here, when Herder refers to a ‘single representation,’ he seems to mean a cognition, which, in virtue of its apparently ‘different nature,’ should be considered distinct from its sensations, even if it is ultimately determined by these sensations. One way to motivate this is to note that if we take the singular nature of a cognition to be a genuine property, it is hard to see how we could explain this property if the cognition were merely a plurality of sensations. Thus, though our cognitions are determined by our physically grounded sensations, the term ‘cognition’ still picks out some- 22 Philip Yaure thing beyond physical sensation—namely, the instantiation of a concept by a particular cognition. II. The ‘Quasi’ Arm Most empiricists would be more or less satisfied by the above picture by itself. But Herder complicates his picture by asserting that the interaction between sensations and cognitions is bidirectional; not only do sensations determine cognitions, but sensations depend on, in some sense, concepts, instantiated by cognitions. Before attempting to reconstr (...truncated)