Only Theorizing
Originally written May 9, 2025
Kant’s repositioning of the Cogito was that the I-think accompanies all sensations. One of his radical moves was positing that time, and not space, is the form of inner sense. He touched on something deep here, and I want to look into it: what gives away the form of one inner moment, that it may be sensed and reproduced by the next? This is the first question to consider. Intuitively, this seems impossible, in that there is no apparent external link between any one moment to the next. This impossibility becomes visible when considering the ability for consciousness to self-reflect on its own previous moments. Reflection on external phenomena does not bring it out because we’re allowed to settle back into our distinction between the synthetic unity (the inner) and the phenomena (the outer). So, it is only when the inner must be also treated as outer that the problem is made transparent.
I am tempted to ask questions like what the first ever consciousness-moment was. Maybe this would clear some things up. The Buddha was smart, though, in saying that asking such metaphysical questions is like questioning where the arrow protruding from one’s stomach came from instead of actually pulling it out. His reason for saying this is just as much analytical as it is practical. It is not just that the more interesting problem to him was the removal of suffering; it is that asking such questions gets us no closer to the truth of the matter. The ease with which my question leads me into a Kantian noumena-phenomena dualism startles me. A dual ontology of events and bodies is nothing like an ontology of things and appearances. But with how bracketed away bodies are — with how utterly and absolutely inaccessible they are — one easily can fall into the trap.
An important point of clarity comes from the Dhamma: the mind, which we often conflate with consciousness, is not actually consciousness. Mind (mano) is an externality, and a base of sensation, equal in kind to the other five senses. It is unique only in terms of degree, that is, in terms of its capacity for karmic activity. This locus of activity fools us into believing it to be something other than itself. It is, in a way, a difference of degree.
Moments of consciousness, thus, are not syntheses of mental perceptions, but accompany those synthetic perceptions themselves. This does not mean the mind plays no part in my question. We can ask how the mind performs syntheses of sense data (whether those data be mental or not). We find that the answer relies on consciousness, not as the synthesizer, but as the engine of activity. A moment of eye-consciousness, for example, plants a seed which, if ripened in the proper way — that is, due to intention — spurs further activity. Or, in a different pathway of action, latent tendencies of synthesis and unification latch onto new moments of eye consciousness, replenishing their needs and renewing their existences. In this way, it is always the mano which becomes the ultimate site of synthesis for most moments of consciousness. Here, keeping Bergson in mind allows us to navigate the waters of this mental ocean clearly and with lucidity. We must remember that in the purely temporal and non-spatial flow of consciousness, a synthesis of moments is no “bigger” a moment itself than the moments constituting the synthetic source. In this way, moments are different only in kind, and never in degree.
So, it is not that new moments of consciousness capture the form of earlier ones, as my original question implied. It is, instead, that the activity of old moments leads to an organic sprouting of new moments the resemblance of whose form to previous forms is more aptly thought of as a coincidence than a necessity. But it is not pure contingency, that is, it is not purely by chance that forms of one moment to the next have some resemblance to each other that lets us make sense of the world. In the middle way between contingency and necessity is consciousness. Because we may ask: what is the conscious moment that accompanies each sensation? Is it like a transport protein or a hemoglobin, handling and transporting its cargo? Or, is it more like a driver in a car? The answer is neither. Consciousness is that absolutely immanent field of sensemaking that rears its head in the differential space between bodies. But of course, the bodies are bursting at the seams, thoroughly intermeshed, without an iota of space in between them. Consciousness is the all-productive extrabeing nothingness that does so much, that accompanies every moment of sensation, yet upon inspection is nowhere to be found.
There is one final twist of ultimate irony. In my previous writeup, I said that the final stage of thinking is a complete shift to the temporal. I was deceived. There is a fourth stage and it is so sinister. When all thinking becomes temporal, then any internal relations between moments must become dissolved, for each moment of consciousness, as it were, must be taken for itself and for nothing else. But the moment you do so — the moment you dissolve that final spatially schematized relation and relish in the unadulterated flow of things — suddenly the only thing you’re left with is spatialities. First, there was a mountain. Then, there was no mountain. At last, I saw that there was only a mountain.
In a cruel turn of fate, the third stage is no less spatial than the second.
