The anti-intellectualist doctrine, however, that data of consciousness cannot be understood, conceptualized, defined, or even named—cannot, in short, be objectified—without contradiction is as important for the problem of knowledge as it is for the problem of freedom. Professor Perry’s analysis of immediatism[145] shows the misunderstanding of what it is to conceptualize, which underlies such a doctrine. The anti-intellectualist idea seems to be that the concept is static, and common to more than one consciousness, and universal in its denotation, and sharply discrete; and that for these reasons it could not correspond to what is fluid and private and uniquely particular and continuous. It is evidently the “copy theory” of knowledge, which unconsciously determines this criticism of the concept. Concepts are invalid, applied to life, because they are not like living objects! “You cannot make continuous being out of discontinuities,” is James’s criticism.[146] And Bergson’s: “Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other [intellect] perceives distinct and, so to speak, solid colors, set side by side like the beads of a necklace.”[147] But, as Perry shows, to conceptualize is nothing like this procedure. Conception is substitution of one object of immediate consciousness which is conveniently abstract, for another object which is, in the circumstances of the conceiving, inconvenient in its concrete fulness. All that is necessary in order that this substitutional mode of consciousness should be valid and true knowledge of the object so symbolized, is that the substitute should mean that object. And that it can and does mean it when the object is a subjective state is no more than the fact that, on Bergson’s own showing, such states are symbolized. For to mean is essentially to symbolize. Certainly no one concept is a rounded-out exhaustive awareness, so to speak, of the symbolized object. But this is no more than to say that conceiving is a selective and eliminating mode of consciousness—which does not distinguish it from any other mode, the most immediate and intuitive possible state of genuine significant consciousness being essentially as much an elimination as a positing.
Since, then, a symbol never has (just by reason of its function as symbol) the same structure as the object symbolized, there is nothing either in the immobility, or the publicity, or the universality, or the discreteness of any concept, or in its inclusion of all these characters, to prevent its validly meaning the fluid and private and particular and continuous. And the real must necessarily have the conceptual characters, since the characters correlative to them, alone regarded by Bergson as characters of reality, have no meaning except correlatively to the conceptual characters. Thus “fluidity of nothing” is a phrase without meaning. The something which is fluid, requires, in order that fluidity as such shall be a datum of experience, a coefficient aspect of immobility. It is not fluidity that flows. The immobile, snap-shot conceptual form—not only does this belong to the cataract, as the possibility of photographing it proves, but this very form is indispensable to the fact of flow in its genuine concreteness. As for uniqueness, a fact so unique that it is like nothing else in any respect, could not be discriminated. The bare discernibleness of a datum requires a basis of discrimination which is common to it and to that from which it is discriminated. Continuity is analogous with unity, and has no meaning if there is no aspect, in it, of composition, and so of discreteness, as unity is nothing if not union of a plurality. That the real has the aspects eulogistically favored by intuitionism is beyond question. That it has not the complementary conceptual aspects is demonstrably false, and is an illusion of “exclusive particularity,” explainable only by that prepossession with a certain abstract view, whose psychological origin has been repeatedly noted in this study.
Is it not truly a paradox to give the unnamable a long list of names—life, consciousness, freedom, duration, intensity, quality, heterogeneity etc.—and to write a book, whether practical or speculative, concerning that which will not articulate into discourse, (cf. above, p. 54–5), employing these names on every page; and to conclude with a studied definition of freedom; and to avow that the purpose of it all is to make the fact understood that the subject-matter cannot even be named, still less defined or discoursed about or understood? It seems improper to consider that the book is about such a subject, and yet necessary to suppose that it is about some subject, and impossible to assign another. If it is true that, in seeming to name this subject, you are deluded; that, in trying to talk about it, you fail, and name and talk about something else, instead, its spatialized symbol—then the conclusion is perfectly valid that such a book is a case of this delusion. And the trouble lies in that reifying of the coefficients of reality and of consciousness which is the condition of a philosophy of “pure” intuition (cf. page 29). To suppose that genuine cases of awareness can be either pure intuition or pure conception is to reify these coefficient aspects of consciousness, which are as truly both indispensable for the genuine concreteness of an actual case of awareness as are the positive sine and cosine for the real acuteness of an angle (i. e. for the angle to enclose acutely space revolved-through). As the zero point of either trigonometric projection is the vanishing-point of the entity of whose nature they are coefficient functions, so the “purity” of either coefficient function of consciousness is the vanishing of any real awareness.[148]
If no logical reason impugns the validity of conceptual knowledge of subjective states, no more does the pragmatic test discredit such knowledge. It is as good, genuine knowledge in its satisfaction of vital interest as the sensation, say, which is the object of the state in question. Helen Keller, incapable of the sensation blue, knows the sensation—conceptually alone, of necessity—rather better, even, it may be, than she would ever have known it if her life had been more occupied in the knowing of blue—and other such—things; better, at any rate, certainly, than most people know it. All this knowledge can be is a rationalizing of “blue:” she can name it, define it, understand it, make articulate and significant statements about it. The intellectual mode of knowing blue is thoroughly significant. It finds blue in experience, and enables the conscious subject to identify this object when she comes across it. By this knowledge, blue is part of the currency of Helen Keller’s social commerce. It is a factor in her life, with its importance and interest. Obviously, she can have got it only by conceptualizing it.
Of course the proposition that consciousness is indefinable has the same futility as the proposition that it is unnamable; because, indeed, they have the same meaning. The meaning, we have seen, is that, in trying to name or define what is fluid, private, etc., there is a miscarriage; it is something else that gets named or defined, to wit the representative or symbol of what was aimed at. This symbol, being fixed and public, is able to lend itself to application of the fixed and public name or concept. But we have also seen that a name is only a symbol; an unnamable thing could not be symbolized. If, by hypothesis, it is symbolized, it is therein namable.
But naming a thing is ipso facto relating it, for it is associating it with something else, its name or symbol; in naming the thing you have started upon the process of defining it, which is the infinite process of relating it or understanding it. Exempting things from naming or definition, sequestering them from the rational domain, is like setting a limit to space. Sequestering from the rational domain is relating to it, and that is putting into it.
If the illusion in trying to name and define mental states is due to their fluidity and privacy, by the same token the same treatment of physical objects, which Bergson regards as valid treatment, is in fact equally illusory. To be sure, physical objects have not, according to the author, the flow of duration, but they are even less dependable creatures than mental states, for in every new moment they are something absolutely other than anything which was in the moment before. Besides which, in spite of this really incessant instantaneity, something, not explained, causes them, upon the “intersection” of our duration with them, to appear to us to be self-identical but changed, even as we ourselves. Physical objects are not fixed. One finds no exceptions in nature to the universal law of change; and the state of any physical thing at a given moment is the outcome, in continuity, of its previous states, to an indefinite regress of antecedents, quite as the case stands with the ego. In respect to duration, discriminating between physical and mental is not valid. Even between organic and inorganic matter or between conscious and unconscious organisms the difference is only one of degree or tempo of change. But if so, it is arbitrary, if one regards the present state of the conscious organism as embodying the whole of its past, to deny this of the stick and the stone. Of course mental states are not permanent; subjects, objects—nothing is permanent that has existence. Nothing stays as it is. The scope of naming and defining is not limited by permanence. Neither, however, is the flux of nature chaos, that it should not be understandable. Change, on the contrary, is the manifestation of law, in the time of Heraclitus, now, and forever.
Privacy or uniqueness is no more obstructive to understanding than is change, and, like change, has no peculiar applicability to mental states as matter of knowledge. Privacy or uniqueness applies to physical objects of knowledge in essentially the same way as it applies to mental states. Mere accessibility is, in principle, common for all objects of knowledge, to all subjects.[149] But there is a special reason why the subject of the state is particularly disqualified, as compared with others, for knowing his state immediately, i. e. intuitively; namely, that, at the time of the existence of the state, when, alone, it could be known intuitively, he is mainly occupied with another object of knowledge, the object of the state in question. You do not, then, know a mental state best by living it, or rather in living it; your knowledge of it is just then at its worst, since you are then preoccupied in knowing something else. The state, as an attribute of the subject, is clearly one of the subject’s relations, and, so, conceptually distinct from either term. It cannot be at once a knowledge and the object of that same knowledge. Bergson’s treatment of the conscious state conceives it in just that way—as if the relation were itself one of its own terms, the object.
Knowing a mental state can only mean understanding it. It is not a concrete datum, like the sky, but an abstraction from the relationship in which the subject and the sky function as terms. One does not intuitively know the subjective process of blueness, in looking at the sky; one knows the sky in that sense, but the process only conceptually, by reflection. Is it any less an authentic object of knowledge? Is it not itself—is it any symbol of itself?—which you name and define and talk about and understand?
The practical significance of saying that one felt and now remembers a feeling is not that the feeling is what one ever felt. Feeling Number One is not an object for feeling Number Two, neither during Number One nor afterward, in reminiscent feeling. So far as the reminiscent state is another intuition, its object is the same as that of the intuition remembered—so far. But to be reminiscent, a conscious state must reflect upon, or refer to, a conscious state distinct from itself. This reflective reference is a conceptual co-element together with the intuitional character of the reminiscent state. So far as the memory is reflective, consciousness is oriented toward the original state itself as a fact, a process, conceptually distinguishable from the object of it. It is thus only so far as conceptual that subjective processes can be objects of knowledge, or, in short, be known. But if so, Bergson is wrong in two essential points: in denying that subjectivity can be objectified, and in affirming that knowledge of subjectivity is immediate (i. e. non-conceptual) or intuitive.