Conscious Ambivalence

“Momentary” stands in what follows for “more or less momentary,” or what is called “the specious present”.

Engagements are intentional aspects of a person’s life, such as mental attitudes, actions, thoughts, and feelings.

Husserl emphasizes the intentional aspect of consciousness, while relating it to some idea of phenomenal consciousness, which can be rather massive (Ideas, 1931) or only a shadow (in the later Cartesian Meditations, 1960).

The following presentation reconstructs Sartre’s analysis of pre-reflective, non-thetic consciousness as self-consciousness (1958, ‘Introduction’) in accordance with the first and third features of outgoing consciousness.

The feature can be reformulated to allow for outgoing consciousness without an object in such cases as “general feelings” (for instance, feeling relaxed) and conscious “intransitive” actions. The formulation would appeal to the relations of object-less feelings and actions with other engagements that are object-directed. Alternatively, we may in such cases stipulate suitable objects, for example, the world or the person herself.

It is clear from the preceding lines of §107 that the topic is self-consciousness and not only the consciousness of the object: “It is almost as if one said: we can’t see ourselves going hither and thither, because it is we who are doing the going (and so we can’t stand still and watch). But here, as so very often, we are suffering from an inadequate form of expression… For… one does indeed have a particular visual experience if one is doing the going oneself”. Wittgenstein rejects however the explication of going up as itself to something in terms of a further sensation.

Conscious attitudes clearly surpass the momentary consciousness, but conscious running or the seeing of a tree also go out as engagements that transcend the conscious moment. (The moment of running has a past and a future, and is held as interlinked with specified and unspecified actual and possible engagements).

Although focussing on human persons, the paper exhibits the relations of personhood (or subjectivity) as such with consciousness and ambivalence.

I defend the understanding of mental attitudes as basically rational interlinked dispositions in Razinsky (2014). As debates on the nature of attitudes are often motivated by questions about the relations of mind and brain, let me note here that whatever one’s position regarding these issues is, it ought not to hinder one from thinking of attitudes as dispositions-perspectives, towards which consciousness can go out.

The mooring in consciousness should not exclude the psychoanalyst’s unconscious attitudes, but would exclude the view that sunflowers like the sun in so far as they incline towards it.

See Searle (2002) for a position that emphasizes the dependency of mental states, or at least intentional mental states, on (mostly intentional) consciousness.

For conceptions of consciousness that are somewhat closer to the view here proposed in regard to the outgoing and the phenomenal dimensions, and in regard to consciousness going out as the person’s engagement, see Chalmers (2004) and Crane (2007). See also Moran’s (1997, 2001) discussions of self-knowledge for a conception of consciousness similar in several ways to the one here presented. However, Moran divorces the third-person and first-person perspectives.

This is to say that her ambivalence was conscious. “Conscious” and “consciously” are not used in this paper in the colloquial sense; and, in particular, in describing a person as consciously engaged, I do not suggest that she is very conscious of (something about) herself as a potential object of attention by others.

Which is not to say that ambivalence is never maintained for a brief moment.

Koch (1987) also studies conscious ambivalence, or “coexisting conflicting emotions,” because they make the ambivalence hard to deny.

I analyse mental unity as unity in plurality, and compare it with simple unity in Ambivalence (forthcoming, Ch. 5). Ch. 2 reviews the philosophical approaches to ambivalence and also examines the situation in Empirical Psychology, Queer and Post-colonial Studies, and Decision Theory.

Jackson (1985) is a rather rare example of actually attempting an argument in this line.

Self-deception is interpreted this way in Gendler (2007).

See “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Davidson (1980).

Freud is often read this way (mistakenly I believe). Rovane (2004) argues that human beings are often divided internally between different persons, and that internal conflicts fall under such divisions.

The question as to whether there is a gap between how a person’s consciousness goes out and how that person is in the relevant matters would often be itself indeterminate (all the more so when the gap is taken to be intentional for one can subtly feel intentional gaps). Consider, however, also that in a sense there is necessarily a gap between an engagement and how it goes out, as well as that the character of any engagement and of any outgoing consciousness is necessarily indeterminate.

One might ask whether Hume does not in fact understand consciousness as outgoing. Husserl, for instance, viewed Hume’s approach as a mixture of a promising treatment of consciousness, according to which the phenomena have eidos, alongside the imposition of his positivism and sensualism on this treatment (see “Naturalistic Philosophy,” in Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Husserl 1965). Indeed, Hume regularly discusses types of phenomena and regards phenomena as of such and such an essence or eidos (for instance, phenomena of pity). The psychological questions that he is interested in, in the second half of the essay, are always questions about human psychology, i.e., about consciousness as going out in a particular direction. Sensualism appears in these discussions mainly in the arguments and not in the conclusions. In this respect, Hume regards consciousness as outgoing. At the same time, Hume interprets the notion of “a general idea” in sensualist terms (1911, Book I, Part I, Sec. VII), and thus when he appeals to general ideas that depict consciousness, for example in speaking of impressions arising from people and objects, or of happiness and anger, it might be wrong to suppose that he takes these ideas to be capturing the conscious person’s perspective. Hume would apparently take the fact that a given impression comprises anger as a merely “scientific” fact, external to the person’s consciousness. For an impression to constitute anger would only mean that the impression evokes, at times, other ideas “of anger,” and that these sensations received a common name.

I take it that at any given moment, consciousness goes out in multiple directions, not necessarily contrary, that may or may not be phenomenally distinct from each other. It seems that Hume maintains a position that allows for less variegation, and emphasizes, when needed, mingling.

Ambivalence invites, however, the worry of such deterioration, in which nothing would be ambivalent anymore (see Razinsky, Ambivalence forthcoming, Ch. 13).