It is plain that the judgment, however complex, is a single idea.
The relations within it are not relations between ideas, but are
themselves a part of the idea which is predicated. In other words,
the subject must be outside the judgment in order that the content
of the judgment may be predicated of it. If not, we fall back into
"my idea of the earth goes round my idea of the sun," and this, as
we have seen, is never the meaning of "The earth goes round the
sun." What we want is, "The real world has in it as a fact what I
mean by earth-going-round-sun." (P. 81.)
We have already pointed out the difficulties into which Bosanquet's
presupposition as to the nature of reality plunges him. This is but
another technical statement of the same problem. If the subject is
really outside of judgment, then the entire _content_ of the judgment
must fall on the side of predicate, or idea. In the paragraphs that
follow, Bosanquet brings out the point that the judgment must
nevertheless contain the distinction of subject and predicate, since it
is impossible to affirm without introducing a distinction into the
_content_ of the affirmation. Yet he considers this distinction to be
_merely_ a difference within an identity. It serves to mark off the
grammatical subject and predicate, but cannot be the essential
distinction of subject and predicate. His solution of the puzzle is
really the one for which we have been contending, _i. e._, that "the
real world is primarily and emphatically my world," but he still cannot
be satisfied with that kind of a real world as ultimate. Behind the
subject which presents my world he postulates a real world which is not
my world, but which my world represents. It is the relation between this
real world and the total content of a judgment which he considers the
essential relation of judgment. This leaves him--as we have pointed
out--as far as ever from a theory of the relation of thought to reality,
and, moreover, with no criterion for the distinction of subject and
predicate within the judgment. To say that it is a difference within an
identity does not explain how, on a mere basis of content, such a
difference is distinguished within an identity or how it assumes the
importance it actually has. He vibrates between taking the whole
intellectual content as predicate, the reality to be represented as
subject (in which case the copula would be the "contact of
sense-perception") and a distinction appearing without reasonable ground
or bearing _within_ the intellectual content. When subject and predicate
are regarded as the contents in which phases of a function appear, this
difficulty no longer exists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account