Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1Mitchell, Arthur
Philosophy
Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1
Mitchell, Arthur
Humanities
“You show,” writes Professor Bergson, in the letter quoted before,
“that perfect intuitive knowledge, as I mean it, would consist in
coincidence with the object known; but that then there would no longer
be knowledge of any object, since only the object remains.--Yet, in the
case of an entirely free action, _i. e._ an act in which the entire
person takes part, one is _altogether_ in what he is doing; one has,
at the same time, consciousness of what he is doing; and yet he is not
duplicated in observing his own activity, absorbed as he is in the act
itself: here to act and to know (or rather to possess) are one and the
same thing. Intelligence, always outside of what it observes, cannot
conceive of knowledge without distinctness of subject and object. It is
intelligence that propounds your dilemma: ‘Either there is knowledge
of the object, hence distinctness of object and subject; or subject
coincides with object, and then there is only object: knowledge
vanishes.’--But reality does not accept this dilemma. It presents us,
in the case cited, subject and object as a single indivisible reality,
action and knowledge of the action as a single indivisible reality, of
which intelligence _subsequently_ takes two points of view, that of
object and that of subject, that of action without knowledge and that
of pure knowledge. We have no right to set up these _points of view_ of
reality as _constitutive elements_ of reality itself.”
The last sentence accuses me of doing what I am most zealous to show is
the foundation fallacy of intuitionism! I have been contending that,
when Monsieur Bergson says that subjectivity cannot be objectified,
he is speaking as if “objectifying,” instead of meaning to take a
point of view, means to alter the reality symbolized by the word
“subjectivity.” (Of course the question concerns concrete cases of
subjectivity, the intuitionist contending that a given subjective state
cannot be objectified--_i. e._ named, defined, etc.) Now, this seems to
me precisely to “set up a point of view of reality as a constitutive
element of reality itself.” But intuitionism does even worse than this.
Having set up this point of view of reality, and treated it in this
concrete way, and worshipped it as the Absolute, it snubs that other
point of view, which, by the very nature of the genuinely concrete
reality, is coördinate with the deified abstraction, its brother and
peer. The object has “such reality as that of rest, which is the
negation of motion,” the absolute and positive; “yet it is not absolute
naught.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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