CHAPTER V

THE MYSTICAL YEARNING OF INTUITIONISM

I will conclude these comments on Professor Bergson’s teaching by noting the mystical nature of the central idea of his epistemology, the identification of subject and object. The yearning for a more intimate acquaintance with the thing-in-itself, for a knowledge truer and more searching than the “practical” and “useful” reactive relations which we bear to our “phenomenal” objects--as if such experience were unworthy the sacred name of knowledge--this, the prime aspiration of the intuitional philosophy of Bergson, reduces to a futile, if not a morbid, yearning after self-contradiction. The more you know a thing “in itself,” the more you “internalize” your relation to it--in short, the more you identify yourself with it--the less you bear any significant relation to it at all, any relation, obviously, but that of identity; the less, notably, you bear the active and cognitive relations toward it. The indispensable condition of Paul’s knowing Peter is that Paul should _not_ become Peter. Things can neither be nor be conceived except in _some_ relations, any more than relations without terms. If you know the thing in its relations, you know the thing as much in itself as a thing is capable of _being_.

“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.”

It seems to me that Bergson virtually admits the impossibility of the coincidence of subject and object when he says that instinct and intellect are neither possibly pure, which is deeply true. But then an action “completely free” is only a limiting case, is it not?--a case which would put the action out of relation and so out of activity? In a certain obvious sense “the whole person takes part,” perhaps, in _any_ action; but I cannot imagine any action or state that could be other than a relation between object and subject. I cannot see how perfect self-expression in one’s act makes in any degree for obliteration of ontological distinctness between agent and patient, subject and object. How may action be conceived to dispense with reaction? How deny its relational character, then, without denying its activity--in short, without contradiction? “Perfect self-expression” distinguishes certain acts, no doubt, but the distinction is ethical, denoting a teleological harmony, not a metaphysical identity between subject and object.

To say that one _is_ completely one’s act and yet _knows_ his act again confuses a relation with one of its terms. Is it merely a matter of taste to choose to say that such a state--_i. e._ perfect absorption in one’s act--is _not knowledge_ of the act just in so far as it is the act? Is it not necessary to distinguish between the subject’s relation to the act, on one hand, and to those things, on the other (which are neither subject nor act) entering, together with the subject, into the act? Those things, it seems to me, are the object, and the act itself a relation between the subject and them, a relation which wears a conscious as well as an active aspect, and which, as knowledge, is knowledge of the things, not of the act, not of itself.