Any reminiscent state, like every other conscious state, undoubtedly is intuitive in a certain degree. The calmest reflection on an originally affective experience is tinctured with a rudimentary fluttering of the old feeling; just as, on the other hand, the most violent early repetitions of a tempestuous joy or grief must relate, in order to be reminiscent, to the original experience. No one else, it may be said, can appreciate my feeling as I do, myself: this appreciation is no conceptualization of that feeling. This is only to say that the affective as well as the representative aspect of any conscious state is unique for each subjective center of interest. But privacy no more distinguishes subjectivity from objectivity than does change. Every object, being self-identical, is unique, its quality private. Inasmuch as each conscious subject is a distinct center of interest as well as a distinct cognitive subject, the affective value of a state of a given subject must also be theoretically unique for that subject. But the state is nevertheless objective and common as well as subjective and private, since in fact it is an object for understanding. My state of mind is as accessible to your understanding as your own (it may be more so, to be sure). The understanding names the intuitive state—anybody’s at all, indifferently, one’s own or another’s— as truly as it names any other relationship or process, by virtue of its conceptual coefficient; and as truly relates it to the rest of the rational universe, therein understanding and defining it.
The derivation of the three heterologies elucidated in the three chapters of the Essai, is the inevitable consequence of the fundamental heterology of an “absolutely” two-fold universe. The intensity of mental states could not be homogeneous, for Bergson, the variousness that belongs to them could not be plural, their organization could not be determinate, because then they would be objective, by his definition of objectivity. But why may a subjective state not be an objective state? To the conceptualist, to whom these terms are abstract concepts, points of view, discursive contexts, there is no reason at all. To Professor Bergson, who does what he accuses conceptualism of doing, namely substituting concepts for concrete realities, it is a contradiction, for one concrete reality cannot be another. But a concrete reality which, for a certain purpose and in a certain context, one symbolizes by the term “subjective state,” may very well be the same concrete reality which, for another purpose, one symbolizes by the phrase “objective state.”
We have seen that intensity which is “pure,” pure quality, is pure nothing, being quality of nothing; since, if it is quality of anything, it has its quantitative coefficient, which destroys its purity. So variousness which is “pure” heterogeneity, is not even various, but “nothing” again. For it is “interpenetrating” instead of “juxtaposited” or impenetrable heterogeneity. But impenetrability is just identity, as Bergson remarks;[150] it is a logical principle rather than a physical law. That two bodies cannot occupy the same space and time means that they would therein not be two, or coexistent. Now, interpenetration in any rigorous sense, any but the loose colloquial sense of small division and uniform diffusion, is the mere contradiction of impenetrability or identity. It means that two bodies do occupy the same space at the same time. If, then, this law of interpenetration thus means to require (in the subject) the relation of coexistence, and also (in the predicate) to forbid it—in other words, if it is contradictory to itself—mental states can obey it no better than pebbles. And, finally, non-quantitative causality is a third contradiction, since its “pure” heterogeneity destroys its continuity in time as well as in space (cf. above, page 93).
How can any of these three pairs of heterologous principles of space and time be “absolutely” different if, however different, each pair have such essential community of nature that both must be called by one name and thought under one category, as two species of the same genus? For, in spite of all their differences, they are, throughout the discussion, two kinds of intensity, of multiplicity, of causation.
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.”