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Meeting of the Aristotelian Society at 5/7, Tavistock Place, London, W .C .,t on Monday, 18th May 1970, at 7.30 p.m.

XIV—NON-DISCURSIVE THOUGHT— AN ENIGMA OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY

By A. C. LLOYD

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The jargon woid ‘discursive' has commonly been used as the opposite o f ' intuitive But the vagaries and the linguistic origins of its use and that of its Greek counterparts, will not mattet here.In Greek philosophy two notions can be found which aie or can Λ ( be conveyed by ‘ non-discursive thought ’. The more familiar is the notion of a so-called jrjunediateYhinking which is contrasted with one that is inferred or demonstrative. This notion comes vdirectly from the ‘ nous ’ which Aristotle called our knowledge of the premisses of demonstrative knowledge. Like Plato he had of course, and passed on to the Schoolmen and to Descartes, a generic concept of thinking which included knowledge as one of its species. This first kind or alleged kind of non-discursive thought presents the philosopher with all the problems about intuitive knowledge. But it is not particularly enigmatic. The problems have been well canvassed. There is a more radical notion of non-discursive thought which implies Λ ίΓΤΓηΓnot propositional thought. This is the kind or alleged kind of thought that is likely to be associated with the ‘ intuition ’ (' intuitive ’ and so on) for which ‘ contemplation ’ (‘ contemplative ’ and so on) is often a synonym. Roughly speaking, it would be a case of thinking, or thinking of, say beauty, without thinking something about beautv.~sav that beauty is truth. ThislTsneaking roughly because it is the meaningfulness of such a notion which is to be considered later. But it is the sort of talk which has come down from influential Greek philosophers. It is enigmatic in a way which non-demonstrative or immediate knowledge is not. First historically, because it is not obvious that Aristotle, d je v e n the Neoplatonists believed that anything in fact corresponded to the notion; secondly, becauseifbne b rm ore of them did, there is the puzzle what led them to do so; thirdly, there is the philosophical puzzle what, if anything, such a belief could mean. The other

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questions are not altogether separable from the third: but even to the extent that philosophy and history of philosophy can be separated I shall choose to raise questions about the validity, as one might say, of the radical concept of non-discursive thought in Greek philosophy rather than to answer them. lt may help to have had the concept analysed and some o f its problems broken down.

Purely for convenience of reference ‘ non-discursive thought ’ will be confined, in what follows, to the second and more radical notion. But two preliminary questions about it must be disposed of. Why, it might be asked, should both notions be counted as non-discursive Ihinking? Thé answer is that in the jargon > ' 1 discursive ’ has always connoted some passage or transition. (This can be traced without too much difficulty not only in the corresponding Latin terms but in the Greek origins of the Latin terms.) When it means ‘ demonstrative ’ or ‘ inferred ’ the reference to a transition of thought from premiss to conclusion is evident. When it is roughly equivalent to ‘ propositional ’ the transition is supposed to be that between concepts. For in their traditional and simplest form these would be the subject and predicate of a proposition, which were themselves thoughts; so for you to think that beauty is truth involved you (or your mind) passing from the thought of beauty to the thought of truth. Kant’s terminology is thus quite normal when he equates discursive thinking with thinking by concept and contrasts it with intuition.It follows too that the sçcQnisense of ‘ non-discursive ’ will entail the first, or ‘ non-demonstrative’ sense which is logically the weaker sense. Singular propositions will present difficulties that have to do with sense and teference, since there are objections to supposing that Sociates is thought of in the same way that wise is thought of. But it is fair to say that singular propositions were largely ignored by Platonists and Aristotelians, and in any case their difficulties are not peculiarly relevant to the notion of dis­cursive thought.

There is a second preliminary question about the range of beliefs represented by “ Greek philosophy ” . Probably the most interesting and certainly the most original ancient writer on the subject of non-discursive thought is Plotinus; and I propose to

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start with an analysis—the results of an analysis, that is—of what he has to say on the subject. If it is asked whether his is one among various concepts of non-discursive thought, the correct, though dogmatic answer is that the features which I shall single out for their philosophical difficulties are ones which were accepted by all the writers interested in the subject. But one possible misunder­standing must be prevented. The reason for starting with this particular Neoplatonist is not, for the present purpose, any interest which is possessed intrinsically by the history of philo­sophy. It is just that in this case philosophy has to be more than usually parasitic because the concept whose validity we may wish to examine is on the face of it so bizarre, implausible, un­intelligible, that one can do nothing else but start from what somebody says it is.

Plotinus is concerned with a type of thought which would be simple, that is, contain no complexity, or as the Neoplatonist puts it, multiplicity, so that it would be nearer to and more like ‘ the One ’ than any type of thought would be which was complex. To describe it might therefore help his reader to understand the One (paradox though that would be), while to practise it would certainly be a step towards the goal of union with the One. From its simplicity three properties in particular were to be deduced.

(1) This type of thinking involves no transition from concept to concept.

This rules out ordinary propositions. And for Plotinus it even rules out (at this level of thought) what would have been called ‘ contemplation of essejces ’ if essence was understood as Aristotle understood it. For he believed that Aristotle’s account of the relation between genus and differentia (animal and rational) failed to prevent them from being a complex of the same kind as when something is predicated of something else.

(2) This type of thinking involves no distinction between the thinker or the thinking on one side and the object of his thinking or the thought on the other side.

Neoplatonists did not regard this as so idiosyncratic or so hard a saying as we may, since they supposed that anyone brought up on Aristotle would be familiar with it. But the trouble with the central equation, that of thinking and its object, is that it cannot

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really be understood except as part of a philosophical theory. The alternative would be false history. For suppose we imagine a blue colour and then imagine ourselves imagining or seeing a blue colour: it is a familiar and indeed plausible claim that we are unable to distinguish the two experiences. This has of course been taken to imply that there ÍTriõ distinction between any blue that we are aware of and the so called act of being aware of it.If this is generalised to cover two kinds of awareness, the one called seeing, hearing and so on, and the one called thinking of, we have an argument for the identity of thinking and its object. There is an obvious objection to the conclusion: it makes qualities disappear when no one is aware of them. This objection could be met by Aristotle’s distinction between the potential and actual quality, a distinction which removes the sting from the charge of idealism. But there is a second objection which will fasten on the difference between being aware of blue by thinking of it and being aware of blue by seeing it or imagining it. What we see, it may be said, or what we imagine is always a particular blue (or blue thing: the distinction does not matter here), but we can think of of a particular blue (or blue thing) or we can think of blue in general. We can be aware, that is think, of blue in general by thinking that blue is more like purple than red. But when we do that we may do it by being aware of some particular blue, for example that of some visual image, or by being aware of a sound or a shape of the word ‘ blue ’ which may perhaps be imagined or actual. It does not matter if these alternatives can be extended indefinitely. Nor does it matter if it is partly and not wholly by being aware of one of those alternatives that we are aw'are of blue in general nor even if we conclude, as we probably should, that it is not by our awareness of them at all—such an awareness may or may not accompany awareness of blue in general. The point is simply that whatever the relation between awareness of a particular sound, shape or image (of or associated with blue) and the awareness of blue in general which is called thinking of blue in general, it is only the former kind of awareness which could provide the quasi-introspective argument for identifying act and object of awareness. (The argument was used by Berkeley and Hume. It has been simpler to class imagining as they did, with

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seeing and hearing. For at least the images are necessary to it and have an existence in their own right, But of course it has a foot in each camp since an image has also to be o f something else.) On grounds which were roughly like this neither Aristotle nor his successors would have believed that this argument could be extended to act and object of thought. It was necessary however to pursue the point for a number of reasons. An over-simplifying reading of Aristotle may tempt one to exaggerate the use he makes of his dogma that thinking must stand to its objects in a similar relation to that between sensation and its objects. Secondly, some modern apostles of intuitive thinking have (I believe) failed to appreciate the difficulties of extending the argument. We shall have also to return (I hope in a more sophisticated manner) to the problem of thinking and thinking of. because it is crucial to the notion of non-discursive thinking.

The philosophical theory which explains Plotinus’ identifica­tion of thinking with its object is Aristotle’s theory of concepts. These can be regarded as the meanings of general words; he called them quite simply ‘ thoughts but also (as meanings of general words) ‘ universais ’. Again as the meanings of general words their primary function was as predicates. But the essence of his theory is to distinguish what a sentence means from what makes it true when it is true; and correspondingly with the parts, he distinguishes what a predicate word means from what makes it truly predicable of the subject when it is truly predicable of the subject. The meaning of the sentence and the meaning of the predicate are each described by him as a thought which is a constituent of a mind. What makes the sentence true and what makes the predicate applicable is each a constituent of the world outside the mind unless per acciclens if the sentence happens to be about thoughts. In the case of the predicate this latter con­stituent is what he calls a form. He therefore has a solution or a purported solution to bur problem how' to find, when we think of (or about) something, an object of awareness which it is plausible to identify with the awareness. If we are thinking of Socrates by thinking that he Is Wise, and also therefore of his widsom, this object by which we think of his widsom will be the concept of wisdom. It is related to our thinking like a so-called internal

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accusative—the dance that is being danced, the dream that is being dreamed—so that although we can describe the act and the o b jec t distinctly, there is one event to be described. (Aristotle w ould in fact have said the same of hearing ard the sound heard when it is heard: but the theory does not depend on that analogy.) This is the notion of thinking or awareness that is recognised by the post-classical Latin ‘intelligere’, whose obvious ambiguity as between ‘ understand ’ and ‘ think ’ is part and parcel of the theory, the alleged English ‘ intellection ’ and so on.

A s well as following Aristotle by identifying thinking and its object in this way, Neoplatonists spoke of thinking, mind, and th inker as being commonly interchangeable notions. This difficulty is fortunately irrelevant here. It is well known though exasperating how Plato and his heirs spoke of somebody’s soul or mind choosing, understanding, thinking something instead of some­body choosing, understanding or thinking it; and it is well knowm how Aristotle and his heirs believed that the thinker to whom ptr excellence non-discursive thinking might be attributed, namely G od, was anyway nothing but a mind.

Denying the distinction between thinker and thought entailed denying that the thinker in this type of thinking was aware or conscious of his own thinking. Or rather there would be a sort of consciousness or a substitute for it which need not concern us here, but not the ordinary sort that accompanies discursive thinking, for this consisted according to Plotinus in consciousness of a self or subject of the thinking. Bergson gives a similar account of this difference when he distinguishes thought from intuition. Plotinus has an argument for it which makes a logical connexion between (1), the denial of transition from concept to concept, and (2), the denial of distinction between thinker or thinking and object of thinking. He appeals to Plato’s argument that thinking with a proposition involves sameness and otherness and is thus incompatible with a type of thinking which is to be simple. This looks like mistaking (1) for (2): but he believes that (1) entails (2). For the negation of (2) entails consciousness of self, which entails the negation of (1). For a subject of thinking which is aware of itself as a subject is one which has a thought that must be propositional, of the form “ 1 am . . . ” (V 3, 10 and 13).

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(3) This type of thinking involves thinking of everything at

By this is meant, not that at some given time whatever are the objects of thought must be being thought of simultaneously, but that all that exists must be thought of simultaneously. In effect, therefore if there is non-discursive thinking of this type, all things are eternally and simultaneously being thought of. The truth of the antecedent and of the consequent is an integral part of Neo­platonic metaphysics; and of course it was accepted by Christian theologians who have regularly attributed the property of tot urn simul to God’s thoughts. Plotinus seems to argue that this pro­perty follows fronTthe simplicity of the thought since it follows from (1); for it both implies and is implied by the absence of succession (IV 4, 1 ; III 7, 3). This incidentally is the meaning of ‘ eternity ’ according to him. But while this may hold for the ‘ simul ' the ‘ totum ’ requires an independent assumption. Either it assumes that all objects of thought, i.e., existing things, are connected---by-what idealists call internal relations—for example, by being species of a genus existence which itself implies the existence of its species. Or it assumes the conjunction of omniscience and uninterrupted thought on the side of the thinker. To shew how one or the other assumption is required would not be to the point here. Moreover they are features which are often attributed only to divine and not to human thinking of this type and often tied to some metaphysical system. I shall not therefore consider the meaningfulness of totum simul.

In addition to the three properties that were held to belong intrinsically to a type of thinking that was non-discursive, because it was simple, two further features were attributed to it both by Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. They held that it differed from ordinary or discursive thought in being unaccom­panied by imagery. But what is puzzling here is not so much that the absence of imagery should be required for non-discursive thought as that its presence should be required for discursive thought. This is an interesting puzzle, but less relevant (I believe) than it might seem. Fifthly, it was held to be practised by and about matterless forms. This even more evidently belongs to a compli­cated metaphysical system. And even though some people have

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argued that non-discursive thinking ought to be explained in terms of such a system I shall ignore it.

IISuppose we ignore both tolum simul and inatterless forms.

Are we left even then with a meaningful notion of simple or non- propositional thinking? Plotinus, but not all Greek philosophers, said clearly that it should be called ‘ contact ’ rather than ‘ think­ing ’ because even in the case of non-cmpirical concepts thinking entailed self-consciousness which was ruled out by (2) and because it excluded language. But he said equally clearly that it was the first term of the triad identified as thinking (nous). So it was partly thought and partly not. Anyone in this philosophical tradition will understand if we say that in order to be more perfect as an actiyity it had to be less perfect as a thought.

I have not chosen to consider models oT non-discursive thought which would assimilate it either to emotion or to sense perception and which sacrifice altogether its link with thought. But it is worth noticing a difficulty about them which may hold also for what we can call a semi-intellectual model of Plotinus and others. The motive for retaining its intellectual aspect is that this activity of intuition is supposed to be the final stage or the goal nf dis­cursive thought. (It must be remembered aTT the time that we are not concerned with the final goal of all, the last stage of non- discursive thought, which is union with the One and a different affair altogether.) We are supposed to think ordinarily about empirical things, then more purely if less ordinarily about non-empirical things (philosophy), then wholly purely but extraordinarily about the latter (intuition or contemplation). But how£an the philosophy be connected except contingently with the intuition? How is it not just training oneself morally and psycho­logically not to be distracted by, for instance, the world, the flesh and prejudices, so as to be better at intuition? This is in fact the position taken by Bergson, who has of course a non-intellectual model of intuition. Or, to put the same problem in a perhaps more pointed form, how can the thinker identify his intuition, which is simple and ineffable with any of the objects studied by his dis­cursive thinking?

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Plotinus is far from insensitive here. He says that we do not recognise our intuition until we ‘ withdraw from it ’ again. When we have done that we reflect and we attend to a ‘ trace ’ o f it like a footprint or an after-image, which we can describe in words; the words will not describe the intuition but they will describe some­thing which resembles it.

Again there is the problem how the reflection and the intuition are connected more than contingently. How is a trace identified as a trace of the intuition? This is a question I leave open.

To simplify the question whether non-discursive thinking is a possible form of thinking at all let us suppose, as the Greek philosophers would have done, that we start from a proposition such as “ beauty is truth ” where the subject is not a proper name or a referring expression. (The fact that for some purposes it may be necessary to distinguish it from a subject-predicate proposition does not matter: we can count being identical with truth as a predicate if we want to.) Suppose further—though again only for the sake of simplicity—that the proposition is not just thought but known: we can distinguish so to say its potential from its actual existence as thought or knowledge, for we can know it without actually thinking it. A corresponding distinction can bo made in the case of concepts, that is thoughts which are at least in relation to the complex thought or proposition simple because they are its elements. These are beauty and truth and maybe something which is supposed to be flic connexion between them; and we can distinguish between someone’s latent possession of, let us say, the concept beauty and his actual, conscious use of it when he actually thinks, let us say, that beauty is truth.

Nothing much hangs logically on this distinction: but it suggests a clear cut line of argument for the possibility o f non- discursive thought. This argument, it seems to me reasonable to suggest, represents or schematises the grounds on which Greek philosophers accepted the validity of the notion. Critics of the notion commonly attribute it to a fallacious assimilation of thinking to seeing, hearing and feeling. I do not want to dispute the contribution or the importance of this assimilation: but the more specific or immediate cause of it, and one which worked in a much more sophisticated way, was in my opinion the roughly

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Aristotelian theory of discursive thinking which will be recognised in the previous paragraph. The argument it suggests is as follows.

Once the problem is put in this setting it is evident that one crucial step is needed to reach non-discursive thought This would be the claim that the simnle concent, sav beq^v . can have an actuaLnot a ! dispositional ’ existence or occurrence on its own, that is without being part of an actually occurring proposition. There might seem to be no justification for this claim except the convenience, as it were, of some metaphysical or theological system. But in fact it is something that we are committed to ex hypothesi. We distinguished discursive thought from non- discursive as the thinking which was complex because it involved a transition from concept to concept. From this it follows that every case of discursive thinking exemplifies the possibility, if not indeed the fact, of a concept being thought on its own. We have only to suppose somebody starting to think that beauty is truth but being knocked unconscious just as he is about to make the transition from the concept beauty to the concept truth (or is, or is truth, or whatever the next concept is taken to be). Or if it is objected that he knew what he was going to think—the proposition he was going to entertain—so that the concept beauty was really part of proposition, let us suppose explicitly that he did not know what he was going to think about beauty; he might have been ordered to think of something about beauty and got only as far as saying to himself' beauty ’ or imagined Helen of Troy or done one of a range of things. This range amounts in brief to anything which he might have done had jr(e been, as we first supposed, starting to think that beauty was truth and which would have made the difference between thinking that beauty was truth and thinking that God or something else was truth.

The second stage of the argument consists in meeting an objection. The notion of thinking is wide and no doubt elastic. We are concerned with a central, intellectual Form to which the purported distinction of discursive and non-discursive belongs. Here, if not throughout the notion, it may reasonably be said, we need to distinguish what is thought from what is though', of or about. Suppose, for example, the answer to the question “ What is he thinking? ” is “ That beauty is truth then the answer to the

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question “ What is he thinking of or about” will not, indeed cannot be the same, namely “ That beauty is truth ” , except incidentally in so far as “ that beauty is truth ” may sometimes be part of the answer to “ W'hat is he thinking? ” The reason for this is of course that we need to distinguish between the case of thinking something about beauty by thinking that beauty is truth and the case of thinking something about the proposition that beauty is truth (e.g., by thinking that it is all you need to know). Grammatical conventions happen to mark this distinction: in English we are said "to think that S is P ” but not “ to think of S is P". In our example the answer to the question “ What is he thinking of?” would have been “ Beauty ” (or possibly “ Truth ” or possibly “ Beauty and truth ”). But it is important to notice that it does not name what is being referred to, in the logician’s technical sense of * refer ’, the material object in the mediaeval jargon. What it names is an intentional object—however we wish to analyse that notion. Now take the purported case of thinking beauty. It is not possible there to say what is being thought of, unless we say that it is identical w'ith what is being thought. We ought in fact to say this rather than “ Nothing” . It amountsto the identity of act and object of thought that was property no: (2) o f ’ simple ’ thinking, and widely accepted. But it must also be distinguished from the alternative of merely denying that there is an object. We must recall the analogy of dancing a dance. Philo­sophers who have believed in non-discursive thought have wanted it to be a kind of knowledge or contemplation. Merely denying that there was an object would make it impossible to satisfy this demand even if like idealists, we reject the additional demand for an object independent of our thought.

It can therefore be claimed that this type of thinking satisfies the requirement that there should be what is thought and what is thought of. But the objection to it required not only that, but that what is thought and what is thought of should not be identical. To require this, it can now be replied, is a petitio. It assumes, in fact is equivalent to. :he identification of thinking as propositional thinking, For the notion οΓ what is thought o f was neither more nor less than the notion of a subject of which something is predicated. Thus non-discursive thinking, the point of which is to be non-

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propositional, will be a contradiction in terms: but tha is the question at issue

Thirdly, we can deal in the same way with a further objection. If there is something thought of, or about, as we have agreed, then there must be an answer, it may be said, to the question “ What is being thought about i t ? ” Here again we have the choice of answering that beauty is being thought about beauty or that nothing is being thought about it. But in this case we must answer “ Nothing ” , In discursive thinking, if 5 is what is thought about, that S is P is what is thought «.bout it. To say “ Beauty is what I think about beauty " is to utter plain nonsense. But it is equally plain that to demand something that is being thought about something is to demand a form of thought which is pro­positional. Some people may find it significant that in order to have made the objection at all the opponent will have found it easier if not necessary to substitute ‘ thinking about ’ for ‘ thinking o f ’. Thinking evidently entails something thought of or about, which so far we have treated as synonymous. But while it may seem immediately evident that thinking about X entails something thought about X, it does not seem so immediately evident that thinking of X entails something thought about X.

The conclusion is that a type of non-propositional thinking, described typically by Plotinus, is implied by a standard model of ordinary or propositional thinking and fits that model suffi­ciently for it to count as think ng.

But this conclusion involves a cont'adiction. It was noticed earlier how an essential feature of thought is that it must embrace the general as well as the particular. For the present purpose it may be easier to see the pair as abstract and concrete. When the beauty which is thought of is also the beauty which is thought this beauty must have the incompatible properties of being abstract and concrete. In order to be what is thought of it must be abstract. In Aristotle’s model of thinking, it will be remem­bered, it was a concept, which in Greek he called a thougnt and identified with a universal; and what was thought o f in our account was a so called intentional object, not the logician s object of reference. We are unable to say that a concept is a concept of something other than itself as an image is, so that we

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might think the concept and think of what it is a concept of, one being concrete and the other abstract. We should not only be false to the model, but what is more, we should contradict the hypothesis of non-discursive thinking that what was thought of was identical with what was thought. But while the beauty which is thought of must be abstract this same beauty which is thought must be concrete (and particular), for it is in turn identical with the act of thinking itself, and this occurs as a datable event.

This suggests a corollary. If the argument from the model of discursive or propositional thought to the possibility of non- discursive thought was valid but led to a self-contradictory conclusion there was something wrong either with the model or with the interpretation of the model. The critical step which it permitted was the step to a concept occurring actually, or being thought on its own. This was possible because the actual complex thought, the propos.tion, was taken to be or to involve a transi­tion from the subject concept to the predicate concept. For the transition or passage is understood as something that itself occurs actually, as an event in the life history of a mind, or rather as one of its acts; and this is what is wrong. (It should be noticed that this criticism is not the same as a criticism to the effect that this theory of a thought fails to distinguish an assertion from a propo­sition. Asserting could, for instance, be an extra act.) If it is said that this is a fault in interpreting the Aristotelian model and not in that model it must be remembered that it was at least one of the normal and traditional interpretations of it. Those who admitted this radical notion of non-discursive thought classed it with inference, and it would have been hard to deny that inference involved actual passage of thought.

More than that, it is hard to see how it is not the interpreta­tion which is forced on us by another feature of the model, the theory of terms, although it is open to question whether Aristotle himself drew the conclusion. I think that terms (as I have said elsewhere) are the ghosts of Plato’s Forms. The subject and the predicate of a proposition are called terms, and a term is some­thing which can (in different propositions) function as a subject or as a predicate. I do not see how they are to be distinguished from Aristotle’s 4 simple thoughts ’ or concepts. If we want to

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prevent a proposition from being a real passage from concept to concept we must interpret concepts so that their reality consists only in contributing to a thought, which is a proposition, while in themselves they are always incomplete. But then each concept will be defined by the contribution it makes to possible proposi­tions; and 1 do not see how this will be compatible with the same concept contributing as subject and as predicate, since subjects do not have the same syntactical properties as predicates. The difference between subject and predicate is irrelevant only if the concept is a unit of semantic function and nothing more: but then it would not be definable only by its contribution to possible propositions.