I am reading the most wonderful book in grad school right now called Phenomenology of the Human Person, by Robert Sokolowski. He has a fascinating chapter where he reflects on the origins of the power to predicate–the genealogy of logic, as it were. He considers three views, chiefly: Kantian nativism, biological nativism, and Husserl’s view.

What struck me, and inspired this post, was routing his treatment to my own Platonic nativism not considered in the text. Defending and articulating the form principles in our soul has fascinating and important consequences not just for philosophy, but for paganism.

Readers can expect more wide-ranging posts like this one, as I get back into the swing of things religiously, and feel more and more like myself again.

For both of the above mentioned forms of nativism, or what we might call innatism, Sokolowski articulates the idea as being that the categories and forms we tend to think of things as coming in are actually templates innately within us that we project on to the things of experience. They are like ‘rules’ or ‘codes’ or ‘functions’ that we bring to what comes to us as raw sensory input or data. For example, according to Kant, we supply experience with the category of ‘quantity’; adding this intelligibility to data that is intrinsically bereft of it.

By contrast, Sokolowski recounts Husserl’s view as being that it is by encountering the reality of parts and wholes in things during continuous perception that we are enabled to mentally distinguish between subject and predicate. What is present to us in experience is not a series of discrete sensory flashes, but a manifold of appearances threaded together by an implicit identity. We can notice the distinction between a thing and its properties when, while perceiving it, our attention is drawn toward some specific aspect of it, and so from the thing as a whole. Zooming back out, as it were, then, we can realize a difference exists between the whole (subject) and part (predicate). ₁

Now, this is not an argument for the conclusion that witnessing ontological mereology somehow causes mental predication to ‘start’: no pathway between the two is specified; no mechanism is proposed. He is saying rather that, phenomenologically, we see ontological mereology, and then we see mental predication. But beware of the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Sokolowski does aim an argument against nativism, but it is a sentence long:

“If the transition from perception to thought happened in privacy and immanence, then communication would be impossible. How could we ever establish a common world?” (62).

But his perspective is easily inverted: how could we ever establish a private world? He will say:

“Instead, we start with what is public, and the apparent ‘psychological’ or ‘privately mental’ achievement of thinking is really an internalization of what is first and foremost a public activity… We go, in fact, from the outside to the inside, not the other way around. We do not go from solitude and interiority to publicness,” (62).

But a nativist can say just the reverse.

Even the psychologist he forwards (Paul Bloom) is never cited as showing this view to be true, but merely, if anything, as sharing the belief that it is.

If one were to prepare a report of the epistemic health of Sokolowski’s thesis based on these texts alone, it would be in the red, or of very poor health indeed (e.g. the inferential distance between premise and conclusion is never closed).

Then again, what Sokolowski does have is a clear vision of things. Inasmuch as his project is to put this vision on display, his effort can indeed be regarded as philosophical. In fact, this, it seems to me, is how real philosophy is done: different visions of a thing are shared, as we peer from different angles, and one or the other ends up either chipping away as we come to see with our own eyes what the other is talking about, or staying in-tact and reasserted if the encountered proposal does not do the object justice. It is a contest of conceptual grit, or integrity. As Sokolowski himself says, “We cannot solve a philosophical problem by introducing a new thing; we can do so only by resolving a dimensional dispute,” (50).

From this view, Sokolowski does not spit out a chain of code after having calculated a problem and computed it. Much more dangerously, he is looking right at the same things nativists are, and not seeing what nativists claim is there.

I think this is how one should respond in turn: by returning the gaze.

And from a nativist point of view, I do not feel the problem. Indeed, if anything should seem absurd or unsurpassable, it should be the posited transition itself, whether from private to public, or from public to private (a sentiment I think Wittgenstein would share, at any rate).

But no such transition is needed. For example, given a constitutive, formal view of the First Principle, all of reality is seamless. Or, given that Form is in and of itself neither particular nor universal, but visible or apparent in either mode, it is the same thing that appears in the substance as particular and before the mind as universal.

Sokolowski will amend Husserl’s genealogy with the additional requirement of intersubjectivity: our paradigming power to predicate is expressive, or communicative, meaning it is dative. That is, we disclose ourselves to others.

But this thesis has the unexpected consequence that this power either came from nothing; emerging spontaneously as a brute fact, or regresses infinitely in eternal recursion. In other words, if predication requires mature speakers to activate a spark in us, how did it ever start?

Much, much more can be said. But I wanted to share this brief reflection. As I learn from Sokolowski, I feel that doctrines like the innate form principles, with their attending theories of mind, are emboldened rather than deflated by their critics.

₁ He will say that “the proposition or state of affairs, as a categorical object, does not come about when we impose an a priori form on experience; rather, it emerges from and within experience as a formal structure of parts and wholes… if things did not present parts and wholes to us, predication and syntactic articulation could not occur; predication takes place between us and things, not within our consciousness or within a subjective world,” (56).

Robert Sokolowski. The Phenomenology of the Human Person. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).