Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1Mitchell, Arthur
Philosophy
Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1
Mitchell, Arthur
Humanities
There are, it is true, voluntaristic and intuitionistic, philosophies
of the highest importance. And the intention of their authors is to
distinguish their method from the rationalistic method. Are they
foredoomed to futility on this account? So far as this intention
is realized--yes, unquestionably. No philosophy that were itself a
function either of will or of intuition is conceivable, since it would
then lack the essence of philosophy, which is critical primacy. That
philosophies designated by these methodological terms may be invaluable
products, it is necessary only that these terms apply in fact not to
the psychological method of the philosophy but to its psychological
starting-point. They express a constitutional bias in the philosopher,
who, after all, is human. To some the qualities of things; to others,
value; and, finally, to other some, the order of reality is the
“essence” of reality. Such essentialness is eulogism, of course. For it
is an irreducible psychological fact that there are religious, æsthetic
and scientific types of mind. Each to his bias; each to his taste. The
apogee of living is religion to the first, art to the second, science
to the third. Hence the illusion that philosophy, which must needs be
experience supremely critical, is experience eulogistically supreme.
Is not this illusion chargeable to failure to see in these three modes
of consciousness three emphases or biases of living? To the æsthete,
certainly, quality must be realest essence. But it cannot be so to the
zealot; for, to him, that is value: nor to the intellectualist; to him
it is order.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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