Aristotle and Descartes on Perceiving that We See

Abstract

The phenomenon described as “our perceiving that we see” or “perception of one’s own perception” (POP) has attracted the attention of many philosophers. In this article, I examine Aristotle’s and Descartes’ treatment of this phenomenon in order to clarify the distinctive features of the respective philosophers’ thought. In his Principia I, 9, Descartes points out that sense-perception is an ambiguous term; for example, ‘seeing’ (or ‘I am seeing’) can be taken as referring either to a ‘bodily activity’ or to ‘the sense-perception of seeing’. The latter, POP, is sense-perception in its proper (praecise) sense for Descartes and what he calls conscientia (consciousness). By restricting the sense-perception within one’s subjective experience, Descartes separates POP from the external object that one perceives. Though Aristotle explores POP in several passages (De anima III, 2, Ethica Nicomachea IX, 9 etc.), I pay special attention to De somno 2, 455a3-455a26, where Aristotle assumes that trans-modal discrimination by a common perceptual power (such as discrimination of sweet from white) implies this sort of second order perception. We can explain this implication as follows: when we discriminate, for example, sweet from white, we also discriminate the respective modes of perception, namely, (our) tasting in the perception of sweet on the one hand and (our) seeing in the perception of white on the other. This means that Aristotle understands POP as an integral part of the first order perception of an object. The second order recognition of one’s activity is involved intrinsically in the perception of the external world. This is why POP is a kind of sense-perception par excellence for Aristotle. Descartes elucidates the same sort of phenomena in an opposite way from Aristotle. He separated Aristotelian unity off between external objects and our inner activity. The Cartesian concept of consciousness is a historical product of this separation.