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On Things in Themselves1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

H. F. Hallett
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Extract

The subject on which I am to address you this evening is one which, though it is of fundamental importance both for philosophy and for practice, cannot but present the gravest difficulties for such treatment as falls within the limits of this occasion. Philosophical problems are always difficult, but those of ultimate metaphysics are in this respect egregious. For the simplifications that are open to the scientific phenomenologist who can rest content with a spatiotemporal world, or to the analyst who concentrates on the objective content with which the human understanding most conspicuously concerns itself, are not open to the metaphysician. He must meet the full complexity of things: not limiting himself to their appearances as objects within human experience, nor to a reflective analysis of their objective content, but taking them as they must be in themselves in order that they may appear as they empirically and reflectively do appear for the special cognitive faculties of man. I ask, therefore, for your patience and attention as I try first of all to lead you into, and then, as I hope, out of, the metaphysical labyrinth. For what I have to describe is something of a metaphysical adventure, or, if you like, a metaphysical ghoststory, in which the ghosts assume such reality as to make the solid things “give up the ghost”—which is just as it should be in a good ghost-story!

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Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 14 , Issue 54 , April 1939 , pp. 155 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1939

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References

page 155 note 2 These views were put forward primarily in the three series of Balfour Lectures: Scottish Philosophy, Hegelianism and Personality, and Realism (the last named being first published in book form posthumously in 1933).

page 156 note 1 Aeternitas (Clarendon Press, 1930).Google ScholarIn the voyage of philosophy every man is partly a “sailer” and partly a “tacker"; and though it is by tacking that philosophical progress is made, and the mind comes to discover itself, it is by sailing that we gather way, and come to understand the traditions of our craft.

page 156 note 2 Like a planet originally drawn off from its sun under the attraction of a passing giant into an outer orbit of “realism”, the mind returns to its centre along a slowly narrowing spiral, under the centripetus of an inescapable logic, and even against its native centrifuge.

page 156 note 3 It would be an appropriate, though anachronistic, nemesis if philosophical progress should prove to have taken its true rise and course from the complementary speculations of a German and a Jew!

page 156 note 4 By “thing in itself” it will be seen that I mean ens in se, not corpus sive objectum in se. The argument at this stage is metaphysical, and refers to Being as such, without special reference to this or that sort of existent the conception of which may happen to be prevalent. If ens in se were taken as equivalent to objectum in se we should have to assert the reality of a “Nothing that nothings” —an expression, negative in form it is true, but nonsensical only for those who dogmatically identify the objective with the real; yet (and indeed therefore) particularly well-suited to the understandings of such “radical objectivists”, as signifying Being that is not objective, and operates non-objectively.

page 157 note 1 And this applies, be it noticed, to both knowledge by “acquaintance”, and knowledge by “description”. Not, however, to “enjoyment” as it is defined by Alexander, though I am less sure about his actual use of it. Cf. especially Space, Time, and Deity, I, p. 19Google Scholar: “The angel's view"; and pp. 103–8: “Subject and object self”. And in the issue, of course, Alexander's “radical objectivism” is not in doubt.

page 157 note 2 One of the chief signs of the greatness of Kant was, it seems to me, his constantly reawakened and justified resistance to the elimination of things in themselves. Even that great scholar, Professor Kemp Smith, from whom many of us have learnt so much, is inclined to complainof Kant's repeated failures to conform to the “genuine critical doctrine”, as if this signified irresolution in the grasp of his own principles, and a feeble recession to dogmatism. On the I contrary, as I think the analysis of the Critick of Practical Reasonindicates, it was genuine insight that led Kant to refuse to make the mere analysis of human knowledge, or experience, the measure of the Real, i.e. to take the unprobed; bifurcation of subject and object as the essential form of the macrocosmic-microcosmic Real. This is not to reject “criticism” but to relegate it to its proper subordinate place in methodology. In ontology it is nugatory.

page 158 note 1 Man's Place in the Cosmos, p. 122. It is surely a curiosity of metaphysical obstinacy that Bradley, who saw so clearly that the fatal difference of subject and object implies that “not even absolute truth is quite true”, could not infer that the real is not object; but he must needs fall back on a real that saves its objectivity at the price of merging, blending, fusing, dissolving appearances in a “higher” unity that, as Pringle-Pattison said, is “asymptotically approached in the lowest organisms.”

page 158 note 2 I use this Kantian phrase to indicate, what I cannot now expound, the relation that exists between what I am advancing, and the Critical standpoint. The thesis might even be defended, I think, that the essence of Kant's doctrine is unconsciously epitomized in Spinoza's definition (Eth. I, Def. iv) of an Attribute of Substance (quod intellectus de Substantia percipit tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens), at least as it is applied to known Attributes. Substance would then be the ideal thing in itself, and the Attributes the ideal objects of knowledge. Spinoza's view seems to have been that where object and thing in itself are ideal, they are also identical. But this is what I am disputing.

page 159 note 1 “There can be no idea formed of a soul or spirit; for all ideas whatever, being passive and inert, they cannot represent unto us.. that which acts.. Such is the nature of Spirit, or that which acts, that it cannot be of itself perceived, but only by the effects which it produceth.. So far as I can see, the words will, understanding, mind, soul, spirit, do not stand for different ideas, or, in truth, for any idea at all, but for something which is very different from ideas, and which, being an agent, cannot be like unto, or represented by, any idea whatsoever.” And, added in the second edition: “Though it must be owned at the same time that we have some notion of soul, spirit, and the operations of the mind, such as willing, loving, hating—inasmuch as we know or understand the meaning of these words.” (Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sect, xxvii.) A grudging admission!

page 159 note 2 “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other.. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.. Were all my perceptions removed.. I should be entirely annihilated.. a perfect nonentity.” (Treatise of Human Nature, IV, sect. vi.)

page 160 note 1 Nor must we forget that the conclusion that knowledge is impossible itself claims to be knowledge, so that the assertion conflicts with its own purport.

page 161 note 1 Of course he discusses the distinction at some length (cf. e.g. Critick of Pure Reason B 157–9), making use of his characteristic account of the difference of “knowing” and “thinking”. I am conscious that I am, though even this is a “thought” and not an “intuition”; what I am in myself I cannot know, but only my appearance to myself, i.e. as an object in time. Yet “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination”.

page 163 note 1 Even the view of the mind as the subject of knowledge, when we do not try to objectify it, bears relation to the object that it knows; and therefore as such stands condemned with its object. This is true whether we adopt a subjectivist or a realist view concerning our knowledge of objects: the subject of knowledge would bear relation to objectivity whether it created its object or received it complete, or took a part only in its construction. In the issue it will be seen that I derive objectivity from otherness, and the object from the opposition and co-operation of self and other.

page 163 note 2 See especially: The Roots of Duality in Human Knowledge (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1937–38, pp. 168–88). Perhaps I may be allowed to say here that the account of perception given in the present lecture constitutes a development of the above-named paper, and is, I hope, therefore more credible. I think that this may be especially the case with reference to the heavy work that seemed to be assigned in some sections of the former paper, to the human body as it is known to physiology. This left me unsatisfied at the time, and I am relieved to find that it was not necessary to the theory advanced.

page 164 note 1 Loc. cit.

page 164 note 2 The paradox is even more pronounced if I look at my eye in a mirror: for then my “dioptrical” eye actually contains my objective eye (or an image of it) as one of its minor details.

page 165 note 1 “When I excite a motion in some part of my body, if it be free or without resistance, I say there is Space. But if I find a resistance, then I say there is Body: and in proportion as the resistance to motion is lesser or greater, I say the space is more or less pure. So that when I speak of pure or empty space, it is not to be supposed that the word space stands for an idea distinct from, or conceivable without, body and motion. Though indeed we are apt to think every noun substantive stands for a distinct idea that may be separated from all others; which hath occasioned infinite mistakes. When therefore, supposing all the world to be annihilated besides my own body, I say there still remains pure space: thereby nothing else is meant but only that I conceive it possible for the limbs of my body to be moved on all sides without the least resistance: but if that, too, were annihilated, then there could be no motion, and consequently no Space.” (Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sec. 116.) Cf. also De Motu, sect. 55.

page 166 note 1 I am anxious to make it clear that I am not asserting that there is a sense of action when we act consciously. This is, in fact, what I am denying: for a sense of action implies a sense-datum of action comparable to a colour-sense-datum. But this would be an objective content, whereas the action of which I am speaking is a thing in itself, and no object. When we act consciously, we consciously possess the action as it is in itself. It is this action consciously possessed that unites the sense-data of kinaesthesis as marking stages of the action: the action has stages only as thus operating and objectified as space-time in which the objective contents are ordered. The important thing is, that I am acting in this set of changes; I am walking, I am moving my finger, and so on. The difficulty we experience in grasping this derivation of space-time, arises from the developed character of all our conceptions and expressions of physical action such as the exploring of the shape of a body by touch or sight. The muscular sensations are so called only in so far as they are referred to the muscles that are already spatio-temporal contours; our exploring of an object is already thought of as physical action of the arm and hand in running over the contours. But if we think ourselves back into the primitive stage of beginning to act and finding an obstruction or resistance registered as sense-content, it will be understood how our action is spatio-temporalized by the urge to arrange the sense-data in an order of co-existences and sequences—an urge founded on practical needs. The action does not itself appear as an element in the objective world, but as its objectivity, i.e. as space-time.* The orders of the various sense-data only determine the special conformation of the “bodily” contours of space-time—not its spatio-temporality. This is the objectification of action in terms that will synthesize with the sense-data. We do not know that they are the only terms—a consideration that may throw light on the unknown Attributes of Spinoza's Substance. Private space-time is the space-time required to do this for the sense-data of the individual; actual space-time that required for the common sense-data of the social whole; standard space-time that required for the standard sense-data of science, which is thus so far a modification of the uniform space and time of Newton. We need not suppose that the most elementary sense-data are already spatio-temporal; they are so only in so far as they are complex. Thus also they become varied by appropriate spatio-temporal synthesis, and are distinguished from the primitive sense-datum of touch (which is indistinguishable from resistance), as sound, colour, taste, etc.

page 167 note * The same is true of the “effort” that Berkeley makes the determining factor in “absolute” motion: we say we move over the road, and not the road under us, because we are conscious of our effort in moving. But if this were a sense of effort it would not help in the least, for it would only be a new sensedatum. It is because it is consciously possessed action that it determines the motion as ours, and not the road's.

page 168 note 1 Cf. the use of this analogy by Descartes in his account of vision (La Dioptrique, Discours I).

page 168 note 2 The complexity of the organ of vision, as a vast assemblage of elementary organs, all working together, as compared with the relative independence and simplicity of the organs of touch, reciprocates with the total appearance of visual space, as compared with the “cobweb-like” character of pure tactual space. The finger, e.g. traces the outlines of the object, while the eye sees the complete outline at once, at least with small objects. For an animal with isolated and independent visual “spots” distributed like the touch-spots of a man, visual space would be very like our actual tactual space when uncorrected by vision. Auditory space is most vague from the relative fluidity of its medium —like a blind man groping with a baton made of plasticine!

page 168 note 3 Hence the “stars” that we see with a blow on the eye, the noises produced by the surgeon's probe in the ear, the silence of the vacuum, and our blindness in a dark room. The specialized sense-qualities are, I think, spatio-temporal modes of synthesis of the primitive touch-datum—at least from the external point of view. In themselves they are actions.

page 168 note 4 I now substitute this term to avoid the exclusively optical suggestions of “dioptric"—the term that I have previously used to express the perception we have of our own sense-organs in the act of using them, and not by external perception: their being in and for self, not their being for an other.

page 169 note 1 Originally the quality simply occupies the contour confronting the self's “point of view”, and is thus perceived as common to the body and to the object. Where the quality is very intense, it tends to attach itself to the body as pain or pleasure; where it is more gentle and varied (as with softness or roughness), to the object. Successive complications of the perception tend to confirm the attribution of the quality to the object as first suggested by the resistance of the other: our combined external and di-aesthetic perception of the body (in which the body may become an object, while other objects do not become the body); the use of the mirror; intersubjective intercourse; the conditions of sight and hearing, which make use of physical media through which the object is felt as remote from the body: all tend in the same direction.

page 169 note 2 Unless, of course, we regard its action as including the action of self-apprehension, or conscious possession; as perhaps we may. The question is not of great importance for ultimate metaphysics if we must deny that body, even as di-aesthetically perceived as space-time, survives in the ultimate Thing in Itself as eternal Extension; as perhaps we must.

page 170 note 1 Thus the most perfect and conclusive science, for which all knowledge would be mathematical, would have for its object, Nothing. Not, however, the Nothing that nothings; but the Nothing that is nothinged: the science of ideal contours, pfosited “for the sake of argument”.

page 170 note 2 Spinoza, on the contrary, asserts that Substance is objectified, among infinite other ways, as Extension, i.e. not empty space, nor space as an abstract concept, but the eternal genetic cause of all physical phenomena. This seems to me to involve the presence in Substance, as being in self, of action that is specifically “physical” (though not “corporeal"—cf. Eth. I, xv, Sch.), together with the infinite other forms of action. If this meant no more than that Substance (Natura naturans) creates the physical world (as well as every other kind of world), the question would then arise: at what point in the hierarchy of creation does “physical” action first appear? Not, ex hypothesi within the creative source, but somewhere within Natura naturata. The further question would then be: where precisely are we to draw the line between Natura naturans and Natura naturata? It has been usual to draw it between Substance (═Attributes) on the one hand, and the Immediate Infinite and Eternal Modes on the other. In that case the Attributes are not creations of the divine objectifying intellect, but fall within its creating nature. That seems to make Extension a distinguishable thing in itself or divine action, among infinite other forms of action in Substance, and this conflicts with my analysis of it. But if we draw the line between Substance as ultimate action in itself, and the Attributes as divine objectifications of that action produced by a creative Intellect, we might then accept Extension (═physical action) as an Attribute of Substance—objectified not by commerce of self and other (as with us), but by creative action. Its objectification among finite beings might then be traced to a transcendent source expressing itself in the transcendental genesis I have described. Spinoza's own proof (Eth. II, i et ii) is a posteriori, in that it infers the Attributes from “individual thoughts” and bodies by removing their limitations.

page 171 note 1 I do not wish to affirm that psychologists have in no degree succeeded in avoiding this vicious objectification of the soul. But the fallacy has, I think, never been sufficiently recognized for psychologists to be as keenly on their guard against it as it deserves. Even the psycho-analytic schools, that have made the most determined efforts to get at the real action of the soul, have produced not a few new monstrous mythological psychical objects.

page 172 note 1 Spinoza, however, as a good intellectualist, has, it would seem, no qualms: “Strictly speaking, the idea of the mind, that is the idea of an idea, is nothing but the reality of the idea in so far as it is conceived as a mode of thought without reference to the object; if a man knows anything, he, by that very fact, knows that he knows it, and at the same time knows that he knows that he knows it, and so to infinity.” (Eth. II, xxi, Sch.). The philosopher is, I think, emphasizing the same point, viz. that consciousness illumines the whole experience, both on its subjective and on its objective side. For an idea is not a passive thing like “a dumb picture on a tablet”, but involves the very act of thinking. (Eth. II, xlix, Sch.) But his expression is obscure.

page 172 note 2 And in the same way our apprehension of another mind is a discovery of identity rather than a contemplation of difference; or it is nothing.

page 173 note 1 This condemnation only concerns subjective mind, i.e. mind qua knowing objects, and not mind in its conscious self-possession. In the same way the rejection of body concerned only its objectivity, and not its self-occupation. But it remains a question, for me at least, whether the action that is the real “body” in itself, and the action that is the real “mind” in itself, can be distinguished, except in their relative perfections as actions. For the self-occupied “body” is not spatio-temporal; and the self-possessed “mind”, though it is conscious, is not in the strict sense “knowing”. The common distinction of body and mind has thus been superseded in the action in itself that constitutes the self. Whether the perfect self-possession of an infinite being involves its spatio-eternal objectification, and reciprocal subjectification, is the question that Spinoza answered by making both Extension and Thought, Attributes of Substance. The question is to some extent one of definition, for plainly Spinoza did not mean by Extension a quantity of space (Eth. I, xv, Sch.); yet neither does he mean merely that the action that is Substance is absolutely free, i.e. has no limiting other: for this truth appears as a separate proposition (Eth. I, xvii). Perhaps he means that since Substance is an eternal action, perfectly possessing itself, this entails a double objectification of its essence, as eternal Thought of action, and as eternal action thought of, viz. Extension. But though we must not forget that he does not conceive the divine Intellect anthropomorphically, as dependent on the action of its independent other (Eth. I, xvii, Sch.) his view certainly seems to involve an ultimate intellectualism that may well be no more than the last refuge of the “radical objectivism” that I have deplored. But, on the other hand, objectification may be synonymous with creation, the essential action of Substance.

page 173 note 2 This applies to conceptual objects as well as to perceptual, in so far as the content of the former, qua objects, is derived from the latter.

page 174 note 1 The abstract freedom of the finite self is “indeterminacy” only in so far as it is conceived as abstract. In its concrete relation with its other, the supposed indeterminacy is realized as partial self-determination, and even, self-legislation. This reaches its ideal expression in the real freedom of the creative One.

page 174 note 2 “So.. by my love Thyself away art present with me still.”

page 175 note 1 Thus vitalism, like materialism, and mentalism, is only an expression of our “radical objectivism.” These are all forms of action, and not spatiotemporal objects. Nor can we escape by the Humian expedient of “neutralism”.

page 175 note 2 Space—time is the pure object (═ O).

page 175 note 3 “Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come.”

page 176 note 1 Thus the distinction between the qualitied objects that we perceive, and the active objects that we recognize by their reaction to, or their co-operation with, our active bodies, is a difference between the object that is given us in our concourse with our other, and the object that we construct by imputing action of various grades, on the analogy of our own active body. The Kantian categories are primarily principles of the constitution of physical bodies; objectivity belongs, as we have seen, primarily to space-time, though the categorized objects are still infected with objectivity. So with all the types of action “imputed” to objects: they are infected with objectivity because our active body is itself an object—though ambiguously so, because the self is viewing it externally, rather than as it essentially should, di-aesthetically. Thus we assign the action that we really possess as selves, to a body that is no more than an appearance of the self; then on this confused analogy we “impute” action in the other to its appearance. In love these confusions are put to confusion, when the self possesses the other, not as other—for the other in itself is not other but self—but as self. It is thus that love is the “emendation of the intellect”.

page 176 note 2 My analysis of the perceptual situation agrees in principle, I think, with that given by Reid, but goes beneath it to provide a “transcendental” explanation of the “suggestion” and “belief” of the real existence of an object, that he asserts to belong by nature to the “simple apprehension” or sensation, and to be neither subsequent to it, nor an inference from it. It explains also Reid's refusal to make “sensation” the mere abstraction that his analysis of perception would seem to entail. The “suggestion and belief” I have combined as “imputation”, and assigned to an external view of the perceptual situation, which in common experience is made at once more adequate, and more ambiguous, by the inclusion of relations that can be apprehended only in the di-aesthesis of the percipient.

page 177 note 1 The “expansion” is less incredible if we remember that “sight” has been extended even on the external view by the optical “batons” that correspond to the blind man's stick in the case of touch. The blind man's hand has, for his di-aesthesis, been transferred to the ferule. So my eye touches the Great Nebula, and rests upon Orion.

page 177 note 2 I will go so far as to say that the real “rose” enacts red—and does so consciously, in so far as it is capable of acting consciously. Thus also the reddened retina of my eye enacts red, and consciously when the optical “batons” are working badly through some error of focussing. Cf. also Descartes's remarks on night-vision in cats in La Dioptrique, Discours I.

page 178 note 1 Cf. B.D.S. Eth. V, xxxvi.

page 178 note 2 “He said, ‘Ye axe gods’.. unto whom the divine apprehension was given” (John x. 35).

page 179 note 1 Cf. Descartes, Meditations, Reply to Obj. V, Med. iii, sect. 10.