Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 115 - Me, Myself and I - Augustine on Mind and Memory.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Me, Myself, and I – Augustine on Mind and Memory In the City of God, Augustine claims that no one can doubt his own existence. If anyone, perhaps a member of the skeptical academy, should claim that even this is doubtful, we can reply that it is incoherent to imagine someone thinking he exists and being mistaken about it. After all, no one can be mistaken without existing. Thus, as Augustine puts it, si fallor sum – if I err, then I exist. Sound familiar? It seems to be a version of the most famous three-word Latin argument in the History of Philosophy, cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Indeed, when Descartes put forward the argument in his Meditations, some of his readers pointed out that the same idea already appeared in Augustine. But Descartes' use of the argument had at least one advantage over Augustine's – he used it in a very prominent place, as the crucial first step towards dispelling total skepticism. Where did Augustine put it? In the 26th chapter of the 11th of the 22 books of the absurdly long City of God. In the newspaper trade, they call that burying the lead. In fact, this buried Augustinian treasure isn't even the main point Augustine is making in the 26th chapter of that 11th book. It's more a digression, occasioned by his observation that the human mind is an image of the divine trinity. All of us mirror the three-ness of God by existing, knowing we exist, and loving the fact that we exist. Typical Augustine in more than one way. Not only is a philosophical nugget delivered in a theological wrapping, but it is uncovered through reflection on Augustine's own self. Though Epictetus and Plotinus are worthy candidates for the title, probably no other ancient philosopher was as keen an observer of his own mental life as Augustine. Again and again, he solves theological and philosophical problems by turning inward. His reflections on evil are bound up with an almost obsessive preoccupation with his own struggle against sin. His merciless and detailed self-analysis exposes the gaping divide that separates imperfect created beings like himself from their Creator. But self-knowledge does not only let us see how different we are from God. Inspired by a verse of Genesis which asserts that man is created in God's image, Augustine believes that studying human nature will be a big step in the direction of understanding the divine nature. That is, in a nutshell, the project of On the Trinity, Augustine's most philosophically ambitious work and the culmination of his lifelong quest to understand himself. This quest begins with the realization of the mind's immediate access to itself. So it's no wonder that it was Augustine who first discovered the anti-skeptical argument that would reappear centuries later in Descartes, especially since, like Descartes, he also thought hard about the problem of skepticism. After all, Cicero, one of Augustine's main philosophical sources, had been a skeptic. Early in his writing career, Augustine even wrote a work entitled Against the Academics, meaning the Skeptics of the New Academy. Here he didn't yet formulate the argument, if I err, I am, found in the city of God, but he identified other types of infallible knowledge, including truths of logic and mathematics. In another earlier work, On Free Choice of the Will, he does make the point that no one could be mistaken about whether they exist. It's telling that, as in the city of God, in this case the error argument is presented as a step toward showing something about God, namely that he exists and is the cause of all other things. In both cases, it would be a distraction for Augustine to draw too much attention to the error argument. Sure, it's a brilliant argument. Really, Augustine deserves to have some hilarious t-shirts, mugs, and posters printed up about it, an honor that has instead gone to Descartes alone. I suspect that more than one philosophy student has ruined a first date by turning up in a I Drink, Therefore I Am shirt. But as Augustine has just said, here in On Free Choice of the Will, he explores philosophical arguments in order to understand more fully what he already believes as a Christian. Thus Augustine's favorite slogan is a biblical quote, which you won't see parodied on too many t-shirts or dorm room walls, Crede ut intelligas, believe so that you may understand. Unlike Descartes, he starts not from skepticism, but from faith, and he uses philosophy to explain the articles of that faith. As we've seen in previous episodes, this attitude is compatible with, indeed even demands, lengthy and sustained inquiry into standard philosophical topics like the nature of language, ethics, and metaphysics. Augustine's treatment of the mind is no exception. Like most Hellenic philosophers, he sees reason, or the mind, as the highest function of the human soul, while the soul in general is a principle of life. As we can see from early writings Augustine devoted to the topic of soul, he follows the Platonists in particular in thinking that the soul is immaterial and lives on after the death of the body. One of his early works distinguishes seven grades, or faculties, of the soul. At the bottom are the functions we share even with plants, like the capacity for growth and nourishment. At the upper end we have two functions of the mind, the desire for truth and its attainment. This inclusion of the desire or love for truth at the most exalted level of the life of soul is a sign of more distinctively Augustinian things to come in On the Trinity. As we already know from our look at Augustine's work On the Teacher, he thinks we attain knowledge not through instruction by humans, but by turning towards an inner standard of truth. This again looks rather Platonist, and in fact Augustine speaks in several works of immaterial forms that provide regulative principles for our knowledge. Of course these are not quite forms as Plato envisioned them. Augustine treats them instead as ideas in God's mind, here following the precedent of several so-called middle Platonists like Philo of Alexandria. This puts the Augustinian soul right where it is for other late ancient Platonists, from Plutarch to Plotinus to Proclus. We don't have to have a name starting with P to be a Platonist, but it helps. As an immaterial substance, the soul has an existence superior to that of the body, but it is inferior to the divine, to which it must look in order to have knowledge. Like Tertullian before him, Augustine insists that the soul is not to be put on a par with God. He doesn't go as far as Tertullian, who envisioned the soul as physical breath to keep it well below the status of divinity, but he does emphasize that soul changes, for example by undergoing moral progress, whereas God is eternal and thus unchanging. Again, this point that soul changes and God does not will be important when we get to On the Trinity. And we're going to get to it right now. We've just seen that the soul falls short of God's eternal perfection. Nonetheless, there is that line in Genesis telling us that we are created in God's image. In addition, there is the Nicene Creed. You'll remember from our episode on the Cappadocians that the Council of Nicaea established a doctrine on the Trinity that became authoritative for many Christians. Augustine was one of them. In line with the Creed and against the Arians, he asserted the total equality of all three persons of the Trinity, which together make up a single substance. This means that when he examines his own nature as a human in On the Trinity, he is not embarking on a dispassionate inquiry into the nature of the soul, its relation to the body, or the workings of the mind, though all those issues do arise and are given subtle and innovative treatment. Rather, Augustine is believing in order to understand. He is looking for a way in which we humans are trinities, that is, substances which by their very nature unify three aspects or functions, just as God is a unity of three persons. It would be a bonus if the Trinity within us had other features echoing those of the divine Trinity. For instance, we would ideally find a human Trinity in which all three elements are equal, as the divine persons are equal, and whose second element is begotten by the first, as the Son is begotten by the Father. You might be scratching your head as you try to think of an example to fit the bill, even without these extra requirements. But Augustine has no trouble reeling off numerous candidates. After devoting the first books of the work to the scriptural basis and correct understanding of the Trinitarian doctrine itself, he proceeds to investigate a whole series of trinities found in human nature. The examples involve different kinds of perception, awareness, and cognition. Augustine must look to the soul for good examples, because a trinity of bodies could never fit the bill. The bodies would not be in the same place as one another, and thus would not truly be a single substance. The same problem affects sensory perception. Here Augustine does identify a sort of trinity. There is the external object, the perception of that object, and the mind's focus on that object, which binds these two together. Since the thing that is seen is outside the soul, though, this is the wrong kind of trinity. Suppose, for instance, that you are at the zoo and stop to look at a giraffe. The giraffe is separate from and independent of your power of eyesight, as is proven by the fact that when the giraffe lopes back into its pen, you can no longer see it. Cases like this teach Augustine two lessons. The first is that the trinity we seek must be entirely within ourselves. If any of the three members of the human trinity is outside us, it will be separate and independent, like the giraffe. That would be a major disanalogy with the case of the divine trinity, so we need to avoid it. The second lesson is that human will or intention binds together the mind with its objects. In the case we just looked at, it is the mind's intention to see the giraffe that produces an act of vision, at least as long as the giraffe stays where we can see it. Bringing these two lessons together, the promising strategy would be to look for a case where the mind wills or intends to know something inside itself. And as luck would have it, this happens all the time. Whenever I think about something I know, or imagine something, or remember something. In these cases, I am not relying on something outside of me. If I consider the Pythagorean theorem, imagine a giraffe that is painted blue, or remember the name of my favorite high school teacher, I am turning my mind's attention to what is already inside it. So, in all such cases there are three things. First, the mental content, the theorem, the imaginary blue giraffe, or the teacher's name. Secondly, the mind's grasping of its own content, its thinking about what it knows, imagines, or remembers. Third, the mind's intention or will to grasp its own content with these mental acts. It is this willing that explains why the mind is entertaining the specific content that it has chosen, for instance by remembering the favorite teacher instead of the teacher who made you stay after school that time just because you were drawing pictures of blue giraffes instead of paying attention in class. Augustine in fact sees memory as particularly crucial for his project. It is involved even in the other cases of knowing and imagining. When we reflect on previously acquired knowledge, we are remembering what we know, and when we imagine new things, we are combining images we have experienced before, such as blue and giraffe. So Augustine's fascination with memory is part and parcel of his interest in self-knowledge. Not only does memory turn up prominently in On the Trinity, but Augustine discusses it at length in the tenth book of The Confessions. There, he speaks of it as a kind of storehouse or treasury for things we have learned or experienced, with a seemingly limitless storage capacity. Somehow the things we can remember stay hidden within the memory until we will them to come forward. This may be more or less difficult, with some things coming to mind immediately, others hovering just out of reach as when a word is on the tip of the tongue. But is it really the things themselves that are the objects of memory? After all, I can remember things that are no longer present, and even things that no longer exist. Augustine concludes from this that at least in some cases, what the memory produces for us is not the thing we remember, but an image of that thing. This helps to explain why remembering something feels so different from really experiencing it. You can remember being angry at your teacher without being angry now, or remember being in intense pain without so much as a twinge of actual pain. Puzzlingly though, in other cases of remembering, we do seem to have the things themselves before our minds. If I recall a number, I would seem to be thinking of the number, and not an image of that number. The same would seem to go for the memory itself. It seems absurd to suppose that, when I remember my own memory, I am getting at only an image of that memory. Which leads Augustine to a puzzle within a puzzle. If the memory can remember itself without an image, then it must be able to remember forgetting in the same way. But if this happens directly and not by an image, so that forgetting just is the content of my memory, won't this mean that we are having a mental act that is both a remembering and a forgetting? That puzzle might itself provoke us to a memory of Augustine's similar point in On the Teacher, that the word nothing must be a sign, but it is hard to see what it could be a sign of. Puzzled though he may be, here in the Confessions Augustine reaches a firm conclusion that is of great relevance to On the Trinity. He is enough of a Platonist to think that he is his own mind, and this means that he is his own memory. After all, in remembering his mind he is doing nothing more nor less than getting access to himself. Memory then, is starting to look like it may offer the Trinity we have been looking for. Since the remembered thing or image is within us, we can avoid the problem that arose in the case of seeing, where one element of the Trinity was separate from the others. By contrast, the memory, what it remembers, and the will to remember are all the same thing, namely the mind itself. The three are therefore one substance. Augustine also gets bonus points, the three seem to be equal to one another, and this Trinity even seems to involve a case of internal begetting, just like the Divine Trinity. When we recall something, the mind causes an episode of remembering through an act of will, which is tantamount to begetting its own content within itself. Though Augustine's score sheet is drawn up in accordance with Christian theology, he's incidentally aiming at that most Hellenic of goals, to fulfill the Delphic command, Know thyself. Like philosophers who identified the mind or soul with some kind of body, like fire or air, Augustine thinks self-knowledge means an immaterial mind knowing itself. This might sound like just more Platonism, but to say that would be doing Augustine a disservice. Think of Plotinus's treatment of the perfect self-knowledge possessed by intellect. He argued that such a self-thinking or self-knowing intellect could not be the first principle, as Aristotle had claimed, because it would necessarily fall short of perfect unity by having two aspects. It would be both what thinks and what is thought, both the knower and the known. Augustine goes this one better by seeing self-knowledge as involving not just duality, but Trinity. There is not only the mind as subject and object of its own mental act, but also the mind's will, which makes such mental acts possible. This is particularly clear in the cases we've been considering, where the mind remembers some specific content within itself by choosing to remember it. Without this intention, which Augustine often calls love, there would be no act of remembering at all. Even if Augustine is motivated by his theological quest to find a human image of the Divine Trinity, the point is a philosophically powerful one. But Augustine is still not satisfied. The cases we have been considering also have a fatal flaw. We go from remembering one thing to remembering another, the content of our thought constantly changing. In a sense, of course, the target of thought never changes, because in each case the mind is thinking about itself. But there is change here nonetheless, and hence a disanalogy to the Divine case. To some extent this is unavoidable. As a created thing, the human mind is inevitably subject to change. Yet we can do a little bit better by leaving aside the acts of thinking and remembering that come and go from moment to moment. These may seem to constitute the whole of our mental life. But in a bold move, Augustine proposes that the mind never ceases to know, remember, and love itself. Our mental life does not consist only of fleeting thoughts and images, but an enduring self-awareness. He even goes so far as to say that the mind's presence to itself from moment to moment is a kind of memory. Thus, we can say that you are remembering yourself right now, even if it is more usual to use the word memory when we are grasping images of things in the past. Obviously permanent self-awareness, by virtue of its very permanence, offers a better image of the eternal divine Trinity than the other human trinities we have considered. But we shouldn't get carried away and think that all humans necessarily have an adequate understanding of their own selves. Far from it. Even many philosophers, clever though they were, falsely believed that the soul is some sort of body. They made the mistake of adding an extraneous bodily image to the mind's basic awareness of itself. And they were not alone. In fact it is almost impossible for us to free ourselves from physical images when we think of our own minds. Thus, we have the most Augustinian of paradoxes, that it should be so difficult for the mind to understand itself even though the mind cannot help but know itself. This brings us full circle to the mind's indubitable awareness of itself. Again in On the Trinity, Augustine makes the point that reminded us of Descartes, that the mind cannot be in doubt about itself. Augustine remarks in The Confessions that nothing is closer to the mind than itself, and it still remains unknown to itself. Again, we see here a parallel between his ideas about knowledge and his treatment of sin. On the ethical front, nothing is more under our control than our own will, yet we remain unable to will the good, even when we want to do so. If our own minds are beyond our knowledge and our will, then how much more will God transcend our efforts to understand and love Him as we should? This means that the project of On the Trinity, as Augustine himself admits, is doomed to at best partial success. There's room for improvement too in our understanding of that project, so we're going to stay with Augustine and with On the Trinity for one more episode. As we've seen, On the Trinity shows us that every person is an image of God, one but also three. So, I'll give you three good reasons why you should join me next time, Charles Brittain. He'll be my guest next time, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.