For the more one insists that the antecedent situation is constituted by
thought, the more one has to wonder why another type of thought is
required; what need arouses it, and how it is possible for it to improve
upon the work of previous constitutive thought. This difficulty at once
forces us from a logic of experience as it is concretely experienced
into a metaphysic of a purely hypothetical experience. Constitutive
thought precedes _our_ conscious thought-operations; hence it must be
the working of some absolute universal thought which, unconsciously to
our reflection, builds up an organized world. But this recourse only
deepens the difficulty. How does it happen that the absolute
constitutive and intuitive Thought does such a poor and bungling job
that it requires a finite discursive activity to patch up its products?
Here more metaphysic is called for: The Absolute Reason is now supposed
to work under limiting conditions of finitude, of a sensitive and
temporal organism. The antecedents of reflective thought are not,
therefore, determinations of thought pure and undefiled, but of what
thought can do when it stoops to assume the yoke of change and of
feeling. I pass by the metaphysical problem left unsolved by this flight
into metaphysic: Why and how should a perfect, absolute, complete,
finished thought find it necessary to submit to alien, disturbing, and
corrupting conditions in order, in the end, to recover through
reflective thought in a partial, piecemeal, wholly inadequate way what
it possessed at the outset in a much more satisfactory way?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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