light upon "me" than upon "house" or "country"--or "experience."
The possible misunderstanding is, I think, actual in the reference to
"our needs" as a criterion of the correctness of truth of an idea or
plan. According to the essays, it is the needs of a _situation_ which
are determinative. They evoke thought and the need of knowing, and it
is only within the situation that the identification of the needs with
a self occurs; and it is only by reflection upon the place of the
agent in the encompassing situation that the nature of _his_ needs can
be determined. In fact, the actual occurrence of a disturbed,
incomplete, and needy _situation_ indicates that _my_ present need is
precisely to investigate, to explore, to hunt, to pull apart things
now tied together, to project, to plan, to invent, and then to test
the outcome by seeing how it works as a method of dealing with hard
facts. One source of the demand, in short, for reference to experience
as the encompassing universe of discourse is to keep us from taking
such terms as "self," "my," "need," "satisfaction," etc., as terms
whose meanings can be accepted and proved either by themselves or by
even the most extensive dialectic reference to other terms.
Terms like "real" and "ideal," "individual," "man," "my," certainly
allow of profitable dialectic (or purely prepositional) clarification
and elaboration. But nothing is settled until these discursive
findings have been applied, through action, to things, and an
experience has been effected, which either meets or evades the
specification conceptually laid down. To suppose, for example, that
the import of the term "ideal" can be settled apart from exhibiting
in experience some specific affair, is to maintain in philosophy that
belief in the occult essence and hidden cause which science had to get
rid of before it got on the right track. The idealistic misconception
of experience is no reason for throwing away its significant point of
contact with modern science and for having recourse then to objects
distinguished from old-fashioned _Dinge an Sich_ only because they
involve just that reference to those experiences by which they were
established and to which they are applied that propositional or
analytic realism professedly and elaborately ignores. In revenge, this
ignoring leaves on our hands the "me," or knowing self, as a separate
thing within which experience falls (instead of its falling in a
specifiable place within experience), and generates the insoluble
problem of how a subjective experience can beget objective knowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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