Seeing is Believing. Leibniz on Perception and Will

VARGAS, EVELYN

Houston

Conferencia; Fourth Annual Conference of the Leibniz Society of North America; 2010

Leibniz Society of North America - University of Houston

According to a commonly accepted view, the term ‘perception’ indicates that the mind is in a passive relation to its object, while the term ‘concept’ seems to refer to an action of the mind. The view pervades current debates on the topic, equally assumed by those who urge us to renounce empiricism insofar as experience is construed in terms of impressions and by those who propose a minimal empiricism based on the idea that … ‘representational content cannot be dualistically set over against the conceptual (Mc Dowell 1996: 3). By regarding perception as a passive act of the mind, they believe, we acknowledge the independence of reality constraining our thinking from outside. For Leibniz, as for Spinoza before him, consciousness is not the essential feature of the mind but its ability to represent, which he designates by the technical term ‘expression.’ Perceptual representations of external objects can therefore be regarded as expressions. The Leibnizian doctrine evolved, I shall contend, from intensive reflection on the nature of the actions and passions of substances. The view, however, is not deprived of epistemological consequences. We commonly assume that perceiving is something we undergo, or, in Leibniz’s vocabulary, a passion of the soul, while the objects of sense act on us. Now perceiving as a natural process is explained in terms of the actions and passions of substances, which in turn correspond to different degrees of expression. Representational content on the other hand is correlated to levels of activity as well. Distinct perceptions in Leibniz´s mature theory correspond to the most distinct impressions of the body. Representational content has no intrinsic meaning but has to be interpreted. But in order to explain how perceptions represent, that is, how those levels of activity have semantic properties, we have to consider ends. To sum up, perceptual experience in animated beings consists in unifying the sensory manifold by the disposition to act in accordance with an end.