Reid's Common Sense and Phenomenology — Epoche B2
Sensation Without an Object: Why Reid Is Not a Precursor of Intentionality The claim to be tested Thomas Reid (1710–1796 [1] ) is regularly enlisted as an ancestor of phenomenology. The reasoning is quick and superficially good. Reid attacked the doctrine that we perceive only our own ideas [2] ; phenomenology holds that consciousness is always consciousness of something; both therefore reject the veil of perception, so Reid was doing early what Brentano and Husserl did systematically [3] . This essay argues that the ancestry claim fails, and fails in an instructive way. Reid's central technical innovation is the distinction between sensation and perception, and the load-bearing part of it is his insistence that a sensation has no object distinct from the act of feeling it. Franz Brentano's thesis is that having an object is the mark of the mental — that every mental phenomenon is directed at something [4] . Reid therefore denies, for a whole class of mental states, exactly what Brentano asserts of all of them. He is not an early exponent of intentionality; he is an early opponent of the principle that would later go by that name. The point is not merely genealogical bookkeeping. Reid's direct realism depends on the denial. It is because a sensation has no object that it cannot be the object of perception, and so cannot stand between the mind and the world. Take the denial away and the argument against the way of ideas collapses. The doctrine Reid attacked The position Reid called the way of ideas descends through John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711–1776). Its core is a claim about the immediate objects of awareness: what the mind is directly acquainted with in perception is an idea or impression, a mental item, which the external object causes. External things are known, if at all, by inference from these. Reid took the sceptical results of the tradition to be a demonstration by reduction. If Berkeley could conclude that there is no material world, and Hume that there is no self and no necessary connection, then the shared premise was the trouble. His diagnosis was that the premise is not the deliverance of any observation but a piece of unnoticed theory: philosophers had assumed that thinking about a thing requires an image of it in the mind, and then found themselves unable to get past the images. The distinction that does the work Reid's reply is not the assertion that we just do see objects. It is an analysis, given in the Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) and set out most fully in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785, Essay II), of what happens when we perceive. He separates two things the tradition ran together. A sensation is a feeling: the smell one has on encountering a rose, the pain of a pinprick. A perception is an operation with three ingredients — a conception of the object perceived, an immediate and irresistible conviction of its present existence, and the fact that this conviction is not arrived at by reasoning. Now the crucial claim. Of sensation, Reid says that there is no object distinct from the act of mind by which it is felt. The smell and the feeling of the smell are not two things, one apprehending the other; they are one thing under one description. When I have a pain, there is not a pain that I inspect and an inspecting; the having is all there is. Reid presses this as a point about grammar misleading us. Our verbs for sensing take objects — I feel a pain, I smell a smell — and the surface form invites us to look for something felt, over and above the feeling. He denies there is anything to find. Why the denial is load-bearing It would be possible to treat this as a curiosity about pains. It is not, and here is why it carries Reid's whole case. The representationalist argument for the veil runs: in perception I am immediately aware of something; that something has qualities the external object need not have; therefore what I am immediately aware of is a mental item, and the external object is known only mediately. Reid's answer is to deny the first premise for the sensory element. There is no something that I am aware of when I smell the rose. There is a way I am, which functions as a natural sign: it suggests the quality in the object, and the conception and belief follow at once, by the constitution of our nature rather than by inference. A sign that is not an object of awareness cannot become a screen. That is the whole trick, and it is why Reid can say both that sensation is involved in perception and that perception is direct. He is not claiming we bypass sensation; he is claiming that sensation is not the sort of thing perception could be aimed at. What Brentano claimed Franz Brentano (1838–1917), in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), sought a criterion marking off mental from physical phenomena. His answer is that every mental phenomenon contains an object within itself — what he called the intentional inexistence of an object. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love something is loved. Nothing physical exhibits this. Two features of the doctrine matter here. First, it is offered as universal: not a feature of some mental states but the mark of the mental as such. Second, in Brentano's own formulation the object is described as inexisting in the act, which is why his readers have long disputed whether he was asserting the mind's directedness at things in the world or a doctrine of immanent objects that is closer to the way of ideas than to Reid. The second point deserves emphasis, because the usual argument for Reid's precursorship depends on the outward-facing reading. It was Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), in the Logical Investigations (1900–01), who separated the object intended from any content immanent in the act, and so produced the version of intentionality that opposes representationalism. Attributing that version to Brentano and th